Resolved battery test

Gateway laptop, Windows XP


this computer is two or three years old. When I got it, a piece of plastic that secures the lithium battery in place was broken off and stuck in the machine. I managed to extract it and the battery now appears to be properly seated (there is another post that anchors it in place still intact). I have seen the power meter go from 67% to 75% over the course of a couple of weeks, but without the adapter plugged into the wall socket, the machine won't boot at all. There is one exception. When I first got it, it booted up and Windows came up for about a minute before the screen went black. It has not booted on battery alone ever since. My problem is to figure out if the battery itself needs to be replaced or if there is some malfunction between the place where the battery seats itself and the machine.

 

Where do you see this level? Is it the Windows battery level measure? The laptops I know have battery utilities that can cycle/condition it, tell you about the life span, etc.

Won't boot, what happens? Do any LEDs come on? Boot actually refers to the operating system, not startup, so you could be able to see the startup screens, but Windows may not boot.

I've found problems with batteries not to be very straight forward. At work we had one where there were problems with boot (after the startup screens it got an error message). Under warranty, the HDD was replaced, then the motherboard, same error. I swapped the battery and it worked so well my boss let me use it for my work laptop. After that it worked flawlessly till the last day I had it.

65 -75% sounds like it should run. Swapping the battery for a known good one would be the best test. Then again, the broken part may be stopping it from charging (or discharging?) correctly. Can you secure it any better, at least to try and test it? (duct tape )

If and maybe, from my opinion.

Matt

 

I get the power reading from Control Panel/Power Options. No utility in sight that I can see... Operating without the house power there is no response whatsoever, no LEDs, no noise, no anything. Dead as a doornail...I think the battery is as securely in place as I can make it, duct tape option notwithstanding.

 

I haven't come across your problem before. Maybe look around for a battery supplier for your model, contact them and ask if they could test your current battery.

The utilities may not be installed, also look through Start -> All Programs, it may be buried with other Gateway utilities. Check the downloads for your laptop model at Gateway. (Did you get a drivers/software disk with the laptop?)

Matt

 

It is a good idea to look into this further.

But to throw in my two cenrts, I suspect that the battery is shot. Lithium batteries in laptops often do last only a couple of years, depending particularly on heat and number of times they were deeply discharged.

Often times when the battery is shot, the computer will indicate that the battery has a good, solid charge. One of my laptops (now running about six years on the same lithium battery) shows 98% charge. But like yours, it will not run unplugged.

To protect the battery, most laptops will not boot up if the battery has less than about 20% charge, and my laptop battery can never hold any more than that now. But it does work to keep the laptop on standby. Does your battery power your laptop on standby?

 

No gateway utilities. Computer is dead as mutton when on the battery, standby or no. I'm assuming the battery is shot and will buy another. If it doesn't work, or if it does, I'll let you know. Thanks for your suggestions.

 

I bought a new battery and everything is fine. Meanwhile, I discovered a button on the back of the old battery which, when pushed, seems to indicate how much of a charge it has. Mine registers 100 but since I can't access it, it does me no good that I can think of. Thanks for all the suggestions. Let's consider this matter resolved. If I can figure out how to do it, I'll mark it as such. Otherwise I'll leave it to administration.

 

David,

Thanks for letting us know the outcome.

Don't worry that you are junking a battery that is really good. There's a small chance that is the case. If your new battery fails after a few days, for example, you will want to revisit the issue.

But I'm sure the readings you get on the old battery that it has a full charge are spurious. That happens. We have no real good way of measuring the charge of a battery.