Laptop charger has a tear where it shows the white wiring. Instead of charging, it says plugged in but not charging. Does this mean i have to get a new charger or is there a way to repair it?
I like to know is there any chance this is my battery as oppose to the charger? The thing is i had this laptop for 3 plus years already. The charger did have a few rip opening but now its more so thats the reason why i believe its the tear and not the battery.
Thoughts?
What is your battery charge %? On newer laptops I’ve seen, you can set the battery to charge for “maximum capacity” or “maximum lifespan”, meaning they stop at 60%-80%, but your battery can last more cycles.
You first need to test the charger to see if you’re getting voltage at the plug end. A cheap volt meter from Harbor Freight is a start if you don’t own one. The output voltage is listed on the charger. If there are wires showing it’s possible you yanked on it and broke it. You can take the charger apart but it involves breaking the sealed case of the charger and splicing it back in. If you’ve never done this then find someone who knows their way around a soldering iron. Otherwise just buy a cheap charger. The factory unit may run you $70+ but you can probably pick up a knock off for $25. There are universal chargers with different plug adapters to fit your laptop but they tend to be expensive.
If you ARE getting the correct voltage then 2 things could be at fault. You may have ripped the power receptacle loose on the mother board or it’s not switching properly. I jerked my cord once and pulled the receptacle loose from the mother board. Ended up replacing the board after a failed attempt to fix the receptacle.
FYI, if the battery is dead the charger should power the laptop when plugged in.
I have had this problem on a couple of different laptops. Most recently my wife’s. After scouting around a number of different locations online I found the following list of possible causes:
*dead battery not holding charge any more
*faulty charger
*damaged plug – bent wire so that charger and laptop do not communicate
*faulty motherboard
*software problem – corrupted registry settings
While the first few are definitely possible and should not be ruled out off-hand, my money is on the last option. Besides the other options can be expensive and you don’t want to be buying stuff that you don’t need. If you have a spare battery and/or charger then play with the various combos.
I can’t remember exactly the method for resetting the registration settings but I will attempt to look it up for you.
J.
When the charger on my Asus Tablet stops working, I stick it in the freezer for half an hour. That solves the problem.
I assume that there is some thermal protection that trips it off, and the cold re-sets it.
Here it is:
Disconnect AC
Shutdown
Remove battery
Connect AC
Startup
Go to control panel and open device manager
Under the Batteries category, right-click all of the Microsoft ACPI Compliant Control Method Battery listings, and select Uninstall (it’s ok if you only have 1).
Shutdown
Disconnect AC
Insert battery
Connect AC
Startup
Google “plugged but not charging” and you will find that this is a common problem. Many people seem to have been helped by some variation of the above. It did take two attempts for me. (No idea why!) One source I looked at suggested an extra step of pressing and holding the on button for 20 seconds with the battery out and charger disconnected to get rid of any residual charge. Sounds iffy but it won’t hurt.
A voltage test should be the first test you do.
However, a common failure in this type of power supplies is that the output electrolytic capacitors go bad. When that happens, you’ll see the rated voltage on the output, but when you try to load it you’ll get just a fraction of the rated current.
A quick and dirty way to load a laptop power supply is to use an automotive 12V 21W lamp. It will draw about 1 Amp, which is half or one third of the max rated load of most power supplies, but it is good enough for testing purposes.
If it can run the lamp at full brightness for a couple of minutes then the power supply is good.
Is there any risk to doing this? Worried that if i select uninstall it might cause problems.
The reason why i think its my cord is because there are tears on it and you could see the wiring in a few places.
Remove battery, plug in charger, start computer.
If the computer starts fine, battery is shot.
If the computer does nothing, charger is shot.
excellent suggestion to use the automotive light bulb. It won’t matter which way you wire it up and it’s a quick test after testing voltage.
If the wires are frayed at the charger base or the plug end it’s from tugging on them constantly.
Some chargers do some verification before the laptop accepts them. I know Dell and Apple have done this before.
Not a reliable test. Charger is evidently supplying power to run the machine. What it is not doing is charging the battery.
It is possible that there is something wrong with the cable or plug. It sounds like there is visible damage. Laptop plugs do not merely have a + and a – contact. there is an additional wire that enables the machine to communicate with the charger which prevents overcharging of the battery among other things.
I don’t think so. You are merely forcing the laptop to reinstall on booting which it will hopefully do properly.
That isn’t clear from what the OP has written.
Well, the error message says, plugged in but not charging.
This means that the laptop is registering some current as coming from the charger. Otherwise it would not be saying “plugged in”.
Now, it is feasible that there is some charge being supplied but not the full 19.3V or whatever it needs to be. However, this is not the nature of shorts when a cable is visibly damaged as this one appears to be. Usually the status is all or nothing or fluctuating depending on lead jiggle. So I would postulate that the full voltage is being supplied.
The question is then what is causing the battery to not charge. There are three possibilities.
- The battery is faulty. I think unlikely.
- The lead is damaged so that communication between laptop and charger is not happening as it should. This is possible given there is visible damage to the insulation.
- There is some corruption to the registry settings which can (usually) be rectified by the process I described above.