What to do if the laptop battery does not charge: all solutions

If we have a laptop, what worse thing can happen than the laptop battery does not charge ? Obviously we would lose the great advantage that portability gives us and it should be an issue that we have to fix as quickly as possible.

It is usually a problem that has a relatively easy solution whether it is a problem with the battery, the charger itself or even the operating system. So we are going to tell you all the possible solutions to solve the problem. Let's start!

Index of contents

Most common problems for which the laptop battery does not charge

Let's start by quickly posing the most common reasons why this problem occurs.

• That the charger is in poor condition: obviously we always recommend checking that the charger or external power supply is in good condition, as this may be the focus of the problem. That the system drivers are not working well: both older and newer model batteries. Windows has the corresponding drivers to detect the battery and manage power. That the BIOS has a bad configuration: in this case we would have to return to the factory parameters and it is recommended to update it to the latest version. That the battery is in bad condition: in the new generation it is possible to check it from Windows, in case it starts up clearly. If not, the easiest way to detect the problem is to know that the PC is working properly.

With that said, let's take care of each of the issues at hand.

Check the charger and connector

We think the first step in finding out why the laptop's battery doesn't charge is to check the charger. This contraption is nothing more than the popular heavy hip flask that is always on the floor and that is responsible for getting us out of a tight spot when the battery begins to drop.

The best way to know that the charger is to blame for everything is to remove the battery from the laptop and see if it starts without it being only connected to power. The reason is simple, if the charger delivers the correct voltage and current, the equipment will turn on, and if it does not, it will continue to turn off until the end of time.

If it does not light, what we should do is look at the LED indicator for the battery, possibly it will blink or it will be orange, indicating that it is not getting enough power. Here two scenarios are going to arise, either the fault of the charger or the fault of the connector.

Blame the charger:

• Let's see if its corresponding activity LED lights up.We check with a voltmeter / multimeter that is delivering the correct intensity and voltage, which are specified in the charger itself. We put the multimeter in position 10A for example and measure the two poles of the connector. the same with the voltage, placing the multimeter in the 20V position or a consistent scale always above the nominal value to be measured

Blame the connector or the other scenarios that we will see:

If you are giving the correct measurements at the end, the problem is located in the equipment. We should check the continuity at the poles, but it is complicated since you had to disassemble the laptop.

• The typical test is to delicately move the connector to see if we can get it to make contact, or to try another similar charger to see if it works The problem could be with the charger cable, but it is also difficult to do this because it is sealed

The moral of this is to find a charger and see if the equipment works well with it.

Reinstall Windows drivers and recalibrate battery

After being more or less clear that it is not the external power supply, we are going to work on the configuration of the operating system to see if we can solve the problem.

The process is quite similar to that of calibrating a laptop battery, so let's see step by step what we have to do:

• We shut down the PC normally and always leaving the power connector disconnected from the equipment so that it does not receive any power and the battery is not damaged when removed.

• If we have a computer with a removable battery, we recommend removing it from it. In case we have a modern laptop, the Lithium-Polymer battery is located inside, so we will choose to leave it on if we do not want to lose the warranty of the equipment if it is less than two years old. external power supply, and without the battery.

• Now it is time to uninstall the corresponding drivers of the operating system, so we will right click on the start button and click on “ Device Manager ”. In the list of components that appears, we will place ourselves at the top in the section of batteries. We expanded it and uninstalled as many drivers as “ACPI compatible” batteries, let's see, in our case it would be 2.

With this what we are doing is forcing the system to detect the battery again and reinstall clean drivers of it. There is always a chance that it has become corrupted due to one of those great system updates. In fact, the following steps are almost identical to when we recalibrated the battery.

• The next step is to turn off the equipment and disconnect it from the power again. In order to eliminate all residual energy, we will keep the start button pressed for at least 60 seconds. Touch to replace the battery if we have removed it before and let it charge up to 100%, so we will wait a few hours. At this point we will turn on the equipment again trusting that the battery has finally charged or at least has a good percentage. As soon as we do this, Windows will reinstall the drivers and everything should be fine. Now we let it download again completely by removing the charger, that is, until the computer is completely powered off and unable to boot. We recharge it completely and in this way we will have recalibrated the battery. With a little luck we will have managed to solve the problem that the PC battery does not charge.

We recommend our guide on how to calibrate laptop battery

We should not do this more than once, since in the full charge and discharge processes the battery suffers a lot.

Check the battery status (curiosity)

It is a curiosity that can be quite important to determine the state and current capacity of our battery, something that we discussed in our article on battery calibration that we leave you at the end.

IF our PC is relatively new and uses a “smart” Lithium battery, it is possible to monitor its state through Windows 10. Let's see how:

• Again we right click on the start and this time select " Windows PowerShell (Administrator) " We place the following command:

powercfg / batteryreport

• Next, we take the path that the command gives us to open the HTML that contains all the information about our battery.

Here we can see a history of the potential evolution of the battery capacity since it was first used or since the last formatting of the system. Very interesting data to see if 100% of our battery is still that 100% or much less.

Defaults in BIOS and update it

If the problem persists and the battery doesn't charge, it's time to take care of the BIOS settings. In this case, we assume that the equipment is capable of starting and giving an image, so it would not be necessary to do a Clear CMOS.

Default parameters

So we are going to turn on the laptop and then we are going to press the corresponding key to access the BIOS. In the equipment documentation, the access key should appear, or also just when starting the screen in a message at the bottom. In most cases it will be F2 or DEL, although in certain cases such as HP or IBM it may be F1, F12 or ESC. So we tried to find the key, never better said.

We go to the Exit section, which will be present in almost all BIOSes whether they are UEFI or not and we will select " Load Default " or similar, that is, return to the default parameters. Then we press F10 and "Yes" to save and restart.

Update BIOS (not required)

After this, it is time to update the BIOS, and currently most laptops have UEFI, so they will have a firmware update system. This can be directly integrated into the BIOS and use the network connection to automatically download and install the new version.

Or manually through software available in the support section of the laptop model in question, or via USB and BIOS Flashback function as it happens in desktop PCs.

There are many manufacturers, so the best thing in this case is to look for the manual of our model and see what we can do about it.

The problem persists…

If the laptop battery does not charge, it only remains to blame the battery itself, since we have practically tried everything. If before we had not dared to check the continuity of the power connector of the laptop or charger, it is time to do it.

Otherwise we only have to buy a new battery or put ourselves in the hands of some technical support to see if something escapes us.

Conclusion about the problem that the laptop battery does not charge

As always, reducing electronic failures to a few assumptions is risky, as it can happen in many other ways. But covering them all is an impossible task and it will depend a lot on the team's circumstances.

We have given the most generic methods and they almost always work. We always recommend thinking before getting down to business and evaluating possible problems and actions that we have carried out before the problem occurred, there could be the key to the matter. We hope that with all these tips and assumptions we have managed to solve this annoying problem.

We leave you with more useful tutorials:

In case it continues, leave in the comments what you have tried and that is exactly what happens to you, so we will try to help you. You can also raise the problem in the hardware forum, where we will surely find out what happens.