What to do if the laptop battery is not charging

If the lap­top bat­tery is not charg­ing, this is not a rea­son to pan­ic. In some cas­es, this can be caused by a sin­gle “glitch” of the BIOS’s bat­tery set­tings or by incor­rect­ly set­ting the charge para­me­ters.

There­fore, the cor­rect course of action when such a prob­lem occurs:

1. Try reset­ting the bat­tery set­tings in the BIOS;

2. Check for the absence of “improvers”;

3. Check the oper­a­tion of the pow­er sup­ply;

4. Rein­stall ACPI bat­tery dri­vers.

If none of this led to the desired result, then it’s time to take a lap­top and car­ry it to a ser­vice cen­ter. Or buy a new bat­tery, depend­ing on the nature of the prob­lem.

Reset battery settings in BIOS

The BIOS may store incor­rect bat­tery usage sta­tis­tics, caus­ing the bat­tery to stop charg­ing. In this case, a reset is rec­om­mend­ed. You don’t have to dis­as­sem­ble the lap­top and pull out the “tablet” — there is a sim­pler and “humane” option.

Instruc­tion:

Turn off your lap­top. Dis­con­nect the pow­er sup­ply from it, remove the bat­tery;

1. Press the pow­er but­ton and hold it down for about a minute;

2. Con­nect your lap­top to the net­work. Do not install the bat­tery;

3. Enter the BIOS, go to the Exit tab by press­ing the arrows on the key­board, select the Restore Defaults item, agree that you real­ly want to restore the set­tings, and then select Save and Exit;

4. The lap­top will start to boot. After that, turn it off again;

5. Con­nect the bat­tery and pow­er sup­ply, turn on the lap­top — and you can con­tin­ue to use it.

The most dif­fi­cult point, in fact, is the third one when you need to enter the BIOS. This is imple­ment­ed dif­fer­ent­ly on dif­fer­ent lap­tops. The gen­er­al algo­rithm is as fol­lows — imme­di­ate­ly after turn­ing on, you need to press one of the spe­cial keys.

Options for “spe­cial keys” can be very dif­fer­ent. Most often it is Esc, F2 and F8. But some­times it can be Del, F12, F10… There­fore, it is worth try­ing a vari­ety of keys. And the BIOS itself most often looks like a white-and-blue table (except for new Asus lap­tops, there are gen­er­al­ly ani­ma­tions all over).

Removing “useful” programs

Some “use­ful” pro­grams in order to reduce the wear and tear of the lap­top bat­tery begin to con­trol the charge. It is believed that if you charge the bat­tery up to 60–80%, it will last longer.

In fact, this state­ment is not with­out truth. Lithi­um-ion bat­ter­ies do lose capac­i­ty as the num­ber of recharge cycles increas­es. How­ev­er, pro­grams that con­trol how the bat­tery is charged do not always work ade­quate­ly with all hard­ware.

As a result, such a pro­gram can, in prin­ci­ple, block the charg­ing process. It is worth review­ing the list of installed appli­ca­tions and remov­ing every­thing sus­pi­cious and “improv­ing com­put­er per­for­mance”. And then restart the lap­top and check — most like­ly, the charge will resume.

Checking the operation of the power supply

If hov­er­ing over the bat­tery icon shows the mes­sage “Con­nect­ed, not charg­ing”, and at the same time the bat­tery lev­el is rather non-stan­dard (for exam­ple, 46% or 72%) — most like­ly, the prob­lem lies in the pow­er sup­ply.

A more strik­ing symp­tom of this is the grad­ual dis­charge of the lap­top with the pow­er sup­ply con­nect­ed. This means that the PSU sim­ply does not have enough pow­er to charge the bat­tery and keep the com­put­er run­ning at the same time.

In this case, it is rec­om­mend­ed to replace the pow­er sup­ply, since they are sold in dozens in elec­tron­ics stores. It is only impor­tant that the new charg­er is equal in pow­er to the pre­vi­ous one.

Reinstalling laptop ACPI drivers

This is rare, but it hap­pens. For exam­ple, when installing an oper­at­ing sys­tem update, dri­vers are installed “crooked­ly” on ACPI equip­ment, as a result of which they can no longer ade­quate­ly con­trol the oper­a­tion of the charg­er and bat­tery.

Rein­stalling ACPI dri­vers is a sim­ple process, since they are already “hard­wired” into the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem and acti­vat­ed by a ser­vice that detects the pres­ence of a bat­tery.

Instruc­tion:

Open “My Com­put­er” or “This PC” and right-click any­where;

1. In the con­text menu, select “Prop­er­ties”;

2. In the win­dow that opens, on the left, click on the “Device Man­ag­er” item. Only admin­is­tra­tors of the com­put­er can access it, so if you are run­ning under a guest or reg­u­lar account, switch to an admin­is­tra­tive account and repeat all these steps;

3. Open the “Bat­ter­ies” sec­tion and find the item relat­ed to ACPI there. Right click on it;

4. Select “Delete” from the con­text menu, and then con­firm your inten­tion to delete.

5. Now the lap­top needs to be restart­ed. Just reboot, not turn off and on. Dri­vers should be fine.

If none of the methods worked

Most like­ly the prob­lem is in the pow­er sup­ply. Bat­ter­ies do not break “sud­den­ly”, a com­plete loss of func­tion­al­i­ty is pre­ced­ed by a long and slow wear. So there is no need to buy a new bat­tery.

It is rec­om­mend­ed that you first con­tact the ser­vice cen­ter, where they will diag­nose and deter­mine what exact­ly is bro­ken in the lap­top.