Resolved Bad battery?

I think I might have to get a new battery, but before I shell out the cash, I'd like folks to give me other things that might be wrong.

For the last few weeks, I've been having problems recharging my laptop. I thought one of my two adapters was bad, but today I noticed the other adapter couldn't charge the laptop either. I tried pulling out all the connections, different outlets, but the laptop wouldn't take a charge. I thought it was strange that both adapters woudl go out at the same time, so I was then thinking that the plug/port on my laptop was bad. I decided to try running my laptop on AC/DC alone, and took out the battery. Lo and behold, the computer is running fine, so the port can't be bad.

I'm now thinking that it is the battery. Before I get a new one, is it possible that it is anything else? I took out the battery, pressed the power button for 30 seconds, then plugged the battery back in, but that didn't work--same recharging problme.

This is the original battery on a 2 year old Toshiba laptop. I would have thought that a laptop battery would be better than this. Up till this point, its been a very good battery, lasting about 6 hours w/o a charge. The last few weeks its been giving an average life of about 2-3 hours (I normally leave it plugged in all the time, but occoasionally do run it on battery power alone).

 

Failing charging circuit on the motherboard?

 

OK, how might I diagnose that?

I have SWI and CPU-Z installed

 

Google: testing the charging circuit on a laptop

 

Certain manufacturers suggest that if you are going to run the laptop with the AC Adaptor plugged in all of the time you should remove the battery.

 

I have heard that as well, but heard from others that it didn't matter. Doing this for two years (up till recently) didn't keep it from keeping a very long charge. Who knows, perhaps the damage was only done in the last few weeks? I'll look into that a bit when I get this immediate concern of mine dealt with.

 

OK thanks for the tip. I see several videos on Youtube. When I get home tomorrow from work I'll give that a go. Thanks for the (potential) diagnosis Doc.

 

No problem.

 

Good luck.

 

When I use my T42 Thinkpads on AC I set the batteries to start charging at 5% and stop at 85%. The batteries are five years old. I get a little over two hours on the 14" with the ATI 7500 graphics (XP Pro) and an hour and a half with the 15" with the ATI 9600 graphics (Win 7 Ultimate) when charged to 100%.

 

Looks like I won't have to buy an adapter or a battery.

Battery is now working, recharged up to 100%.

What I did, that in many cases could have worked, but didn’t, was simply taking out the battery, pushing the power button for 30 seconds, then plugging it back in. This solution has helped with other problems.

Two things might have been the problem:
I did find a screw loose in the compartment where the battery is inserted. Since I was unable to screw it into place, I unscrewed it. It was sticking out, and most likely was in contact with the battery. I have no idea if this might have interfered with the battery’s ability to recharge. If this couldn’t have been an issue, please let me know and I’ll delete this part of the post, so nobody will be sent on a wild goose chase.

In the Device Manager, in the Battery section, I found the Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery and uninstalled it. Restarting found this reinstalled. The battery is now recharging, and has recharged to 100%.

Unfortunately, I did the Device Manager solution and then realized the problem about the loose screw (which had to be taken care of before re-inserting the battery), so I’m not sure which of the two was the proper solution, but one of them did it, that’s for sure.

 

Must have had something to do with that screw because you had already tried the "took out the battery, pressed the power button for 30 seconds ".

Whatever it was, good to hear it's working again. Thanks for letting us know.

Please mark your thread as 'Resolved'.

 

Yes, but the other thing I did was go into the Device manager. Perhaps that was it?

I dunno. All I know is that its working now.