Laptop is Plugged in, but Not Charging!

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WolfLeader116

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Jul 12, 2014
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So 3 days ago, I saw that my laptop said that it had 79% battery, and it said "Plugged In, Not Charging." I then started troubleshooting by unplugging parts and plugging them back in and I looked up online how to fix it. One suggestion was to delete and redownload a driver, that didn't work. I don't have a UEFI BIOS and from what I've seen, I can't find a battery test? feature so that solution didn't work. I have a Compaq Presario CQ-61 with a Hewlett-Packard F.10 10/15/2009 BIOS. Which clearly shows that the BIOS is very old. I believe it's up to date, so I can't really update it and especially not to a UEFI BIOS. Is there anything I can do BESIDES replacing my motherboard, battery (again since I got the laptop with a broken one) or getting a new charger? Perhaps there is a program I am supposed to have? Thanks!
 
Solution
Remove the battery and then plug it in and try to power it on. That way, if it turns on, you know there's (at least temporarily) a good connection between motherboard and DC jack.

JobCreator

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Remove the battery and then plug it in and try to power it on. That way, if it turns on, you know there's (at least temporarily) a good connection between motherboard and DC jack.
 
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jnewegger23

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I had this issue on my Toshiba which was only a week old and I went to my computer and right clicked to select Manage, clicked on devices, selected the battery drivers, uninstalled drivers, AND uninstalled the battery for 2min while connected to power adapter and kept laptop on, reinstalled battery, scanned for hardware changes and it worked again. This is a recurring issue. I emailed Microsoft, Toshiba, talked to techs etc and this is a known issue for some laptops and they have done nothing to fix it. I still have to do this whenever I need to make sure the battery is going to be fully charged. The good news is it works; the bad news is you have to keep doing it as needed.
 

WolfLeader116

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Thanks for that! I forgot to try taking the battery out and seeing if the connection works. It started out very slow with not enough power and then shut down after maybe a minute. I'm going to try getting a new charger and see if that fixes the issue. It also started charging again, but if it stops, then I'm getting a new charger because I need it to be able to charge 24/7 instead of barely giving it enough power to keep up the same battery percentage for 5 hours.
 

JobCreator

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It COULD be the charger, but you may have more underlying problems. When you say "then shut down after maybe a minute," you mean it simply turned off. Black screen. No power. Or did it actually go through a shut down process?
 

WolfLeader116

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The laptop just shut down from now power. But now that today I had a weird issue with it, I am thinking that there is something going on with the motherboard here. I had Minecraft open and was playing with my friend when I went and ate dinner. It was in the ESC/pause mode and when I got back from dinner, both of my monitors were covered in blue and yellow lines that looked something like this: http://i.imgur.com/njv66co.png (Just zoom in to see it. Sorry for the small resolution, but as I didn't think of taking a picture at the time, I had to make it by hand.) Any idea what is going on? I was suspecting that the motherboard is beginning to fail as I also only have an integrated graphics card which is obviously connected to the motherboard. The motherboard also is the part with the charging circuits which could be causing the battery issue I was having earlier.

 

JobCreator

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What make and model laptop is it? More often times than not, you're going to want to put the money that you would spend to replace that motherboard toward a new laptop. A couple hundred bucks, probably to replace a laptop motherboard. If you don't know how to do it yourself, you'll have to pay someone to do it as well. Usually close to $350-$400 for the whole job.
 
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