Strange battery problem - HP Compaq, Windows XP

[PhireSide]

Hey guys,

I'm having a bit of a weird issue that has been happening the last two days. Every so often I would glance down at the laptop's battery light, and it would be flashing. If I then click on the power meter button in the system tray, it says the battery is 0% and discharging. If I then double-click on the battery, it says "On Line, Discharging, Critical. All this while it is plugged into the AC socket. It then runs down the battery within an hour, as if it does detect it is plugged into AC but not providing charge. It is a rather old notebook, an HP Compaq NX7010 so the battery might not be in its best condition.

Has anyone had a similar problem? Just for reference, it has a Pentium M 745 1.7GHz CPU, 1.5GB DDR400 RAM, 60GB HDD (IDE), running Windows XP SP2 with no additional updates.

 

[Tun@]

I had similar issue going on recently on a newer Hp laptop - open HP tools & run the battery check - for me it WASN'T a battery problem it was something else - windows related i think.

 

[PhireSide]

I did the battery diagnostics and it reported fine, strangely enough.

What I did find though was that the power brick had a very rickety cable. We had 4 power outages yesterday, and I was working on the laptop at the time. I carried on working when the power failed, but when it came back on the second time, I smelt burning plastic. The rubber piece from the power brick to the laptop near the brick itself was shorting out, and the power outage at least helped me find it. I stripped away the rubber, soldered it back on, wrapped it up with some tape and it's all good to go. I think what was happening was that I was not getting enough current through to keep the system powered, so it was thinking it had AC power while it was actually running on battery juice. But all sorted - thanks Tun@. BTW, what Windows was that that you had issues with?

 

[Tun@]

Win7 pro 64bit - don't know if your model has it but there's also an AC light that's lit if AC feed is getting thru - have a look where the plug goes into the laptop - is a white light there on mine.

 

[PhireSide]

Win7 pro 64bit - don't know if your model has it but there's also an AC light that's lit if AC feed is getting thru - have a look where the plug goes into the laptop - is a white light there on mine.

When the battery reads critical, it blinks red. Charging it is solid red, and fully charged, it displays yellow.