***Gigabyte P34W v3 "Phantasus" owner's lounge***

Yeah, I'm going to try to call Ken as soon as I'll have some time: I've been busy with work so far.
I'm mainly worried to break the battery if I force it out. Can it explode or catch fire even if the laptop is turned off?

I've also been wondering if it might be possible to use the laptop without the battery. I mainly use it as a desktop replacement (I travel back and forth the US and Europe, so I'd rather have a laptop than two desktops), so I've been wondering about that.

 

Depends the bios and hardware if you can run it without the battery. As long if you dont bend the battery too much or puncture it you shoul dbe fine. It can discharge maybe if something is really wrong inside. Thats why I would hurry.

 

I just spoke with Ken from GentechPC: he was surprised I wasn't able to remove the battery, but as I said, it looks like it's glued to the laptop. He's still waiting for a battery replacement from Gigabyte, but I should be able to RMA him the laptop so he can change the battery: it will be way faster than sending it to Gigabyte.

Now I just need to figure out how to remove the hard drives.

EDIT : got the battery removed by the maintenance crew from my university, woohoo!

 

Hi, it is easy to remove hard drives, i did it straight when bought my laptop I bought my laptop without msata drive and with magnetic disk witch I replace with 480gb ssd and I put extra 256gb m sata . Magnetic disk is in the left bottom corner just 2 screws (if not 3 ) and to remove m sata drive you have to lift it slightly and unplug like a ram it is just above hard drive in funny twisted position hopefully you will sort it out soon this battery look dangerous....

 

Thanks for the clarification. I actually had the battery removed at my local university's help desk, they also showed me how to remove the hard drives, so all is good now I just need to order a new battery.

 

Has anybody else experienced problems with the battery powering the machine?

Lately I can't do anything demanding on the battery without the machine just shutting off. Even when the battery is at 80%, if I use photoshop, the machine just turns off.

This is a 1 year, 2 months old P34W v3.

Another issue: when plugged in, the battery just says "charging 94%" forever. It never reaches 100%.

 

Other than the battery swelling because it had been exposed to heat, I didn't notice any problems with it. The thing is I mainly use the laptop plugged in, as a "traveling desktop replacement", but the few times I had to use it on battery it ran fine.
Worst case, you can always order a new battery from Gigabyte: I received mine this week and it was very easy to replace. Only downside, it costs $115 :/

 

That's pretty much what mine did before the battery started swelling appreciably.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...us-owners-lounge.772517/page-82#post-10200472
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...us-owners-lounge.772517/page-86#post-10246504
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...us-owners-lounge.772517/page-87#post-10304333

I was fortunate in that my first problem report to Gigabyte was before the expiration of the 1 year battery warranty. Since I could document the problem existed before the 1 year mark, they fixed it as if it were still under warranty. However, there are now at least 4 people on these forums reporting the same failure mode, so this may be a battery design defect. If you press them, they may replace the battery for you even though it is technically out of warranty. BTW, mine was swollen to the point where it ripped one of the screws out of the bottom of the case. When I opened it to remove my SSD, HDD, and RAM, there was no way to close it again. So I dropped it off at their offices in pieces (Gigabyte is a couple miles from where I work).

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/archive/pouch_cell_small_but_not_trouble_free

I'm still... struggling with the new battery. It would originally only last 2.5-3 hours on a charge, vs 4.5 hours when I first got the laptop. Charging would progress fine until about 91%, at which point it would slow down. Windows 10 would report 99% and 1 minute left to charge for almost a half hour before hitting 100%. Running two calibrations in a row seemed to fix it and I got 4.5-5 hours again. But over time it seems to slowly revert back to the previous wrong calibration, and soon I'm down to 3 hours again. Until I calibrate it again (charge to 100%, unplug, discharge til it powers off).

One of the causes of lithium battery swelling is supposedly overcharging when the battery is fully charged, so I've been reluctant to charge it to 100%, even to calibrate it. This is probably contributing to the calibration drifting, but I figure it's the lesser of two evils. Since Gigabyte didn't put in a function to cease charging before it hits 100%, I've been using this app to sound an alarm when the charge hits 90%, at which point I unplug it.

http://www.robotonfire.com/bl/

Lithium-ion batteries last a lot more cycles with shallow discharges (like 75% to 25%, or 90% to 25%) than with deep discharges (100% to 5%).

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

So hopefully I'm harming my battery less than I was by leaving it on the charger all the time at 100%. In light of more people reporting the same battery problem, I think I'll drop the alarm to 80%.

 

Anyone else having problems with the Nvidia driver repeatedly crashing when trying to play 3D games under Windows 10? I think I finally tracked it down.

Windows 10 keeps trying to install Intel graphics driver 10.19.15.4301 with its updates. This seems to be the culprit. The Intel GPU drives the screen. The Nvidia GPU acts as a co-processor, and sends each fully-drawn screen to the Intel GPU for display. So in these dual-GPU Optimus laptops, it's actually the Intel driver which controls GPU switching.

Opening up Gigabyte's Smart Update, and reverting the Intel GPU driver back to 20.19.15.4300 fixes the problem for me, and the Nvidia driver stops crashing. At least until next time Windows 10 notices my Intel GPU driver is not up to date, and "helpfully" updates it for me. I'd had Win10 set to never update that driver again, but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided to send all future updates out as one monolithic patch - you have to update everything, you can't pick and choose anymore. I'm seriously considering reverting back to Win 8.1.

 

I think the charging 94% is correct. There was discussion on one of the threads on how it has something to do with cycling and back loop to not cause battery damage or something.

Do you mean that it still tries to charge at 100% (windows says its still charging) or that once it reaches 100%, it tries to charge, checks and doesn't (windows says the battery is 100% but not charging).

With all these reports of battery swelling I'm worried mine will do the same in a year.