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Help - Why is my laptop battery not charging!
SirMickTravis
Posts: 2,607 Forum Member
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I bought this laptop for £100 recently. Seemed to be functioning okay, so I thought what the hell. However for some reason this evening the battery isn't charging. And yes it's plugged in at the mains. Probably got about 10 minutes left. Any suggestions?
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If it's an HP - the Support Assistant has one.
The OP seems to be implying that the battery is draining, which would suggest there's a problem somewhere between the wall socket and the power connector on the laptop.
I agree
Hah! No I haven't. The transformer does get very hot sometimes though.
If what the person above is ayin gis correct, it's not the battery that's the problem, but the connector. I had that embarrassing experience today when you take something that isn't working back to a shop, they test it and it works fine. So I'll try it again when I get home. It was charging slowly in the shop. About 1% a minute. Just thinking about i now though, that might mean that it will still charge but too slowly if you're using the computer for anything substantial, so the charge goes.
Yes a common problem, sometimes they just need re-soldering. My wife got a Laptop for precisely that reason, it cost the princely sum of £2 to get a replacement and fix it.
That shows that a battery can cause some computers (my laptop is an Acer) to switch sources. If the battery is completely dead and it caused the computer to switch from mains to battery source the computer would obviously die.
If this is the case then once you let the machine cool down the battery may start taking a charge again.
Removing the battery and running the PC solely from the mains could easily test this.
I know some chargers are pretty borderline and if you're running the PC while the battery is charging they charge slowly but the charger should always be able to supply enough juice to power the PC and charge the battery to some extent.
This was something you had to be particularly careful about with Dells.
The made a heap of chargers that all looked identical but all had different power ratings and if you plugged, say, a 200w charger into a fairly chunky machine it'd take hours to charge the battery and, if you paid close attention, you'd sometimes see a message, as part of the POST, warning you that the input supply might be insufficient to run the PC and charge the battery.
Maybe worth looking at the manual and ensuring you have a PSU of the correct type?
1% a minute doesn't seem that bad, IMO.
You're looking at around an hour and a half to fully charge a battery while the PC is working and that's not awful as long as it's reliable.
I tend to be rather pessimistic about stuff like this.
What you saw WAS a fault and, as a rule, faults don't cure themselves. All that's gonna happen is that it'll go away for a while, until the next time it causes inconvenience.
As my first boss used to say "The first thing to do with an intermittent fault is to cane the bastard until it becomes a permanent fault and then you can fix it".
If it was me I'd be running benchmarking software, games and anything else I could find which puts the maximum possible load on the PC until the fault can be replicated and then investigate it further.