Speculate as to why my laptop's dead?

Factual Questions
1

This might not be a GQ if only because no one can really diagnose my laptop’s issue, but I know computer problems have been posted here before, so I’ll give it a whirl.

I use my laptop (a year-and-a-half-old ASUS Zen Flip, FWIW) a lot and it’s left on most of the day, if not multiple days. It’s often kept plugged in since I use it from home. Not sure if this matters but figured it could be an issue.

Last week I went out for a couple of hours, then came back to find the laptop off. I thought it might’ve gone to sleep and pressed the ON button, which sure enough booted up and everything was fine.

… for about twenty seconds. Then with an impudent flair, the laptop went dark again.

I thought, “okay, maybe the battery needs to be charged?” It seemed unlikely but gave it a go. Waited a few hours, tried it again.

Booted up. This time, however, it only lasted four seconds before going dark. And now I can’t get [del]him[/del] it to turn on at all.

(I crossed out “him” because I need to stop anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, since it ends up making me sad when I have to get rid of them.)

So that’s the story. After doing a very modest amount of research I see that sometimes laptops get some kind of static charge (?) if they’re near material or whatever, and admittedly I do use it on my chair or bed. This appears to be an easy fix, but I’m not convinced this is that problem, if only because I doubt the laptop would’ve booted on at all, multiple times (even for only a little while), before dying.

As I said above, I know this is impossible to diagnose with any degree of accuracy, and I know I have to bring the laptop in somewhere for an estimate or whatever computer repair stores do. But for now I was just wondering if any of you kindly and knowledgeable people wanna take a stab at guessing what the problem might be. Have you had this happen to you?

FYI, this was $599 when I purchased it–so I guess mid-level, qualitywise? I only mention the cost because if the problem seems like a relatively inexpensive fix then I would of course get it done. But if y’all suspect it’ll probably need a whole new widget to plug into the whatchamacallit so it doesn’t overheat the thingamajig, that sounds too expensive and I’d just buy a cheapo Chromebook (and hate every second of it; I need/want my Office and Photoshop and Steam games, damn it!).

Thanks guys.

2

Does it turn off sooner and sooner with each successive reboot? It could be overheating…? A CPU temp/fan speed monitor might help you troubleshoot that particular possibility. If it is a heat problem, make sure the fans are actually working, maybe blow it out with some compressed air or take the bottom cover off and clean the fans manually. If they’re not working, you can probably replace the fans and/or get one of those laptop cooling stations (they’re only like $20 and can often run off USB power from the laptop itself).

To rule out battery issues, you can try removing the battery altogether or trying to disable it in the BIOS (Google for how to do that for your model, it may or may not be possible).

If you’re able to get into Windows for a few min, type in “Event Viewer” in the start menu search and go to the Custom Views -> Administrative Events section. Look for red errors there or yellow warnings, and see if anything useful is shown.

3

First, leaving it plugged in, instead of using the battery isn’t a good idea. Modern batteries are meant to be used until nearly dead, then recharged. Modern systems protect the battery from overcharging, but as long as you’re plugged in on a full battery, there’s a trickle charge going in that’s reducing (and may have killed) your battery life.

Second, I could be your Windows (you are using Windows, correct?) install is corrupted. Try starting in Safe Mode by pressing F8 after the initial boot screen (before the Windows logo appears). If you can boot into Safe Mode and it still doesn’t work, try choosing the Repair Windows option.

Third, it seems that if you press F9 after the initial boot screen it should allow you to restore your machine to the factory default by using the hidden recovery image store on your hard drive/SSD. Note that this will restore your system to factory new and you’ll lose all your personal data.

4

Thanks for the replies, Reply (heh) and lingyi.

Oh, right, lingyi, I should indeed have mentioned that yeah, this is a Win10 machine (my first–my desktop is still Win7).

Ugh, me and my cluttery language. I buried the lede: the laptop is defunct. IOW, it isn’t turning on anymore. Not just not booting, but not even having a little light when I press the power button. I don’t hear fans or anything even trying to engage.

This is an ex-laptop.

BUT Reply, you do describe the pattern of what this went through (although it lasted a much-shorter period than your situation) before the laptop went down for the count.

  1. It was working fine for days, then suddenly shut down on its own.

  2. I turn it on; it booted up. (I didn’t hear anything unusual with the fans, but maybe that was 'cause I wasn’t listening for it.) Stayed on for about twenty seconds before turning off again.

  3. I am about 95% certain that I would have noticed if the machine was hot, at least at that point, because to turn the thing on, I have to pick it up and try to find the ridiculously non-prominent “ON/OFF” button. So I would’ve felt any unusual hotness.

(It’s very hard to feel by mere touch. I guess it’s supposed to prevent accidental shut-down by clumsy fingers, but it also means that turning the damn laptop off feels like a scavenger hunt.)

  1. Next I waited a couple of hours, because I thought maybe it was overheated or something. Turned it on. Booted it up, yay! But almost as soon as I got to my desktop, it shut down even more quickly than before. I’d say it was only 4 -5 seconds before it turned off.

  2. That was the last time I could boot the thing up. Now it’s just ignoring me.

lingyi, you’re right, I kinda knew it was a bad idea to keep the thing plugged in too much. Heaven knows my phones always yammer on about not to leave the charger in after they’ve reached 100%. Since this is my very first laptop–I know, I’m a relic of the '90s–I got into a lazy habits of treating it like a desktop, which can be left on for ages. It’s entirely possible I’ve killed the battery, as you described.

To both of you: I embarrassingly scared of taking the thing apart to look inside. I was fine with desktops, all that lovely room in the case, but laptops intimidate the hell outta me. But I’ll go look at more videos to see if I can gin up the courage.

Just wondering if it requires a new battery, is that a relatively easy fix? It is with cellphones, but again, I just want to make sure this is cost effective. I don’t want to pay $400 to fix a $600 laptop (which by now is certainly worth less anyway)!

Thanks very much for your help! If anything of my newer description narrows things down, I’d be grateful for any other thoughts you have, if any!

5

Try disconnecting the battery cable. It should be just unscrewing the screws on the bottom and then unplugging the one cable (just do step 1 and then the orange part of step 5 here, skip everything else: Asus ZenBook UX303U Battery Replacement - iFixit Repair Guide)

Then leave the power adapter plugged in and try booting again. If it’s a dead battery, the system should still boot with the battery disconnected altogether

6

In the past did it have an blinking indicator light to show that it was charging when you had it plugged in while turned off?

Does it still do that?

Your description of it’s behavior sounds a lot like the battery isn’t charging anymore.

That could be something as simple as an unseen break in the charging cable, failure of the charger or something more complex like a an internal battery issue.

The first thing I would do is check out the charger. A simple voltmeter can tell you if the connector is good.

7

Not really… modern lithium-ion batteries don’t work like that. What they do have is a finite amount that they can be charged/discharged, and it’s something like 500 full recharge cycles. What this means is that if you run your battery down to 80%, and then charge it to 100%, that’s 20% of a full cycle. So you could do that 2500 times before your battery would crap out. Or you could go from 50% to 100% 1000 times, and so on.

They also have shelf-lives and will self-discharge.

I suppose it’s the price we pay for better performing batteries.

8

Unplug the power supply from both the laptop and the incoming line voltage for an hour. It’s possible that the power supply just needs to be reset. That’s fixed mine more than once.

9

It sounds like the laptop lost external power, and then drained the battery. It could lose external power for lots of reasons, but go through the simple ones first. Is the power adapter plugged into the wall or a powerstrip? Does that wall outlet or powerstrip have power—do they properly power other known-good devices? Does the power brick have an indicator light, is it on? Is the cord from the wall to the brick pushed in all the way? Is the power supply cord firmly plugged into the laptop?

If all of those things check out and there is power everywhere there should be, but the laptop will not come on when plugged in or charge the battery, then there are two likely possibilities; neither good. It is possibly the internal power circuit that is broken. The other is that a wire between the power brick and the laptop is broken, so the brick appears to have power, but can’t deliver it to the laptop. If it’s the second case, then gently moving the cord near the laptop and brick ends (where it’s most likely to break) may get the laptop to start charging.

It really does sound like a power issue to me, as a dead hard drive (or SSD) would result in the computer coming on, but failing to boot up properly. Overheating would probably take longer to show up, and would result in the computer going to sleep, turning off, or getting very slow when the fan would have turned on, not just a few seconds after boot. If it is bad memory that will result in a few beeps, and then the computer sitting there doing nothing, but on.

10

Sounds like the battery is burnt out and needs to be replaced.

11

This is the next diagnostic step. A laptop should work fine without a battery as long as it’s plugged in. It’s possible that your battery is broken in a way that’s causing that to not work. If you remove the battery from the equation entirely and the laptop works then the battery is the problem. If not, then it’s something else.

Also endorsing this. lingyi’s battery advice is outdated. It was once correct, but there is nothing wrong with leaving a laptop plugged in all the time. The battery will last longer than if you regularly discharge it and then charge it. It still won’t last forever.

12

I third or fourth this advice. I have had this narrow down laptop issues many times.

13

Also, if you run a lithium-ion battery down too far, you can’t recharge it with normal equipment- you have to do all sorts of sketchy gyrations to recharge it, if you can even do it at all.

What’s got me a bit bamboozled is that it was working, he went away for a couple of hours, and it’s now acting like the battery is dead. Even if he ran it for 2 hours on battery, it would just have shut down and be rechargeable (most laptops will have circuitry to prevent it over-discharging), and self-discharge shouldn’t be a thing over such a short time period.

I wonder if maybe the battery was on its last legs anyway, and this somehow killed it.

14

Ahh, you folks are the best! I’ll look into your suggestions, there does seem to be a relative consensus on at least the likeliest possibility might be.

Now I’ve gotta go see if I can rummage up a screwdriver that’s tiny enough to open this thing up. My building’s maintenance guys might have one.

Next the fun part will be getting a repair and not being bamboozled/overcharged by the shop because I seem like some ditzy and/or gullible chick. (I may be ditzy and gullible at times, but usually not together. It’s an alternating thing.)

Thank you all very much for your brainstorming! I do hope it’s something relatively easy like a new battery; this is one of the few laptops with a keyboard that doesn’t completely suck.

15

My bolding:

I swear I thought the bolded word was “gravitons” and I was like… okay, this dude is pulling my leg; that’s not a computer thing!

And also when you used “he” I thought “Oh cool, bump anthropomorphizes computers too!” Then I realized what happened.

I should mention that I’m 99% sure the laptop was even plugged in when it shut down that first time, so it feels like bad design that a laptop’s unable to swap its source of power from a dead battery to a working plug/charger. But from the descriptions above it sounds that it really does need to physically bypass the battery entirely (assuming that is the problem) to use the charger. Is that right?

16

Turn the laptop upside down, and underneath you will find a tiny (and I mean TINY) hole, just big enough for a pin or needle to go in.

Get a needle and put it in the hole, press it firmly for a few seconds. That will hopefully reset your battery.

I too have an Asus that is always plugged in, but have noticed a few times that the battery is only half-charged. The needle in the hole fixes the problem for me immediately.

17

I’m not an electrical engineer, but maybe it’s so that you can unplug the laptop and not suddenly lose power for a brief moment, killing your work?

18

^ That’s a good possibility, Reply. I’m gonna assume they have some reason why they do this sorta thing.

kambuckta, thank you very very much! Alas, my version doesn’t seem to have any pinhole, or if it does my eyes (even with glasses) can’t find it anywhere. The closest I get are the two LED holes for the battery & power lights, but obviously they’re not what you were talking about.

From perusing videos and descriptions, I’m pretty sure the Zenbook UX360C doesn’t have an easily removable battery or a reset button. Dang, they must really want to support computer repair stores! I’ve watched multiple “how to take out your battery on an ASUS laptop” by now and I’m more and more convinced I don’t wanna futz around in there. NYC has a computer repair shop on every other block, so hopefully I’ll find one with a decent rep.

A sort of poll: with a 2-year-old laptop that was originally $599, would you recommend that I should a) get it repaired because the likely fix won’t be over 50% of the original cost, or b) save up for a new one? In short: repair or replace?

(I just remembered that the laptop wasn’t without its other quirks; it’s a touchscreen but I haven’t been able to use the touchscreen for nearly a year because it was creating weird issues–e.g., acting as if I were touching it and trying to hit commands when my hands were nowhere near the screen. I had to turn the touchscreen ability off and haven’t used it as a touchscreen device for ages.)

Big thanks to everyone who’s helped so far!

19

A weird touchscreen could be another sign of an electrical issue, or a loose cable or something.

You’re paying a lot for labor at a computer shop. You sure you don’t want to try it yourself? You just need a torx screwdriver set, some patience, and delicateness. But yeah the video (- YouTube) makes it look like a royal pain.

Maybe ask the shop for an estimate? It probably won’t cost $250 in labor to replace the battery, but ask first.

Also check your credit card benefits. Some extend the mfg’s warranty by another year.

You can also get it diagnosed & fixed by Asus even after the warranty: Official Support | ASUS USA

20

Maybe. Under normal circumstances I expect a dead battery would not prevent the laptop from working while plugged in. But batteries can fail in a variety of ways, and it’s possible this one failed in a way that makes things really not work. Removing the battery from the computer lets you eliminate that as a possible cause.

A sort of related example: I once had my car battery die and my car stopped running while I was driving it. That wouldn’t normally happen. Usually when a car battery dies the car keeps running because the alternator is providing power, you just can’t start it later. But it’s possible for the battery to fail in a way that makes the whole electrical system fail.