Charging oddness on my Optimus V

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fancellu

Bronze Level Poster
Won't go past 34%. Its less than a week old.

I'm plugged in, but charge doesn't go up or down. Win7. Is this a known issue?

Do I need to tickle it?

Thanks.
 
F

fancellu

Bronze Level Poster
Fixed (for the moment)

Rebooted. Very odd, simply wouldn't charge before. Anyone else seen such a thing. Battery and laptop are brand new.
 
F

fancellu

Bronze Level Poster
Its come back, stuck at 76%. Says charging but never goes higher.

If I unplug then plug back it, I see the battery do its "filling up animation", then it stops, again at 76%

I really don't want to have to reboot each time this happens.

Anyone know why this brand new laptop would do that? Its bad enough that I have to listen to the hoover like fan go off.
 
OddballMV

OddballMV

Member
Sounds like a cooling issue, i used to get this on my old acer but have now bought a cooling pad and seems fine. If i hovered over the batter icon in the bottom right it would say "plugged in, not charging".
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
You might try calibrating your battery. To do this you need to first of all turn off any screensaver and auto sleep so that there is nothing that will cause the laptop to sleep or hibernate. Then ensure that your power settings for Battery have the Low Power Level at 10% and Low Battery Notification off, the Critical Power Level at 5% and the Critical Battery Action as shutdown.

Now fully charge your battery for 24 hours, ignore the power meter. It's best if you leave the laptop switched off for most of this recharge time. Now switch the laptop on and boot into Windows normally. Then unplug the power supply and leave the laptop until the battery expires and it shuts down. You can use the laptop during this time but you'll probably get a better result if you just let it sit idle.

Then you can recharge the laptop and hopefully the power charge percentage should be more accurate.
 
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fancellu

Bronze Level Poster
Thanks for the tip. However why would I even have to do this? Never had to before, and I have another Win7 laptop, and various laptops before that, no such problems with battery.

This is a brand new laptop. I would have hoped its battery was ready for use when delivered. What with the ongoing fan issue, if it wasn't for the fact that I have
all my work on this now and can't afford the downtime, I'd be returning it.
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
fancellu said:
Thanks for the tip. However why would I even have to do this? Never had to before, and I have another Win7 laptop, and various laptops before that, no such problems with battery.

This is a brand new laptop. I would have hoped its battery was ready for use when delivered. What with the ongoing fan issue, if it wasn't for the fact that I have
all my work on this now and can't afford the downtime, I'd be returning it.
Click to expand...

Establishing the actual state of charge of a battery is way harder than you might imagine. Knowing the state of charge of the house batteries on my yacht is very important and yet it's a tricky thing to do with any real accuracy (Google Peukert's Law). I have no idea what hardware and/or Windows component is responsible for determining the state of charge of a laptop battery but it's quite possible that the software and the actual state of charge of the battery have got out of sync. It may well not be a problem with the battery at all, nor with your installation of Windows.

As well as calibrating the battery you might want to time how long the battery will power the laptop from fully charged (over 24 hours charge time). The time to worry is when the actual battery life is reduced. I understand your frustration but that % remaining indicator is no more than an educated guess.

:)
 
SmokeDarKnight

SmokeDarKnight

Author Level
Yeah i agree with Ubuysa, i usually do this on my laptop every month or so and i think its helped the life of my battery as well.
 
F

fancellu

Bronze Level Poster
No, I mean email sent, no reply. For a company that like to sell itself on good support, I'm not feeling it.
 
Rakk

Rakk

The Awesome
Moderator
fancellu said:
No, I mean email sent, no reply. For a company that like to sell itself on good support, I'm not feeling it.
Click to expand...
Remember that emails can take upto 2-3 working days for a reply when they are busy (as I believe they are at the moment), the phone lines are a much faster way to get a response if you can.
 
F

fancellu

Bronze Level Poster
Am following ubuysa's charging advice. Let's hope this sorts out the battery. Good thing I'm working from home on my Ninja PC.
 
F

fancellu

Bronze Level Poster
Just got a reply from support, no useful suggestions as from ubuysa:

If you are having problems with the battery on your system please feel free to log into your account with us and request a return. Once this item is back with us we will be happy to have the item tested then replaced if need be.

Anyway, have drained battery, twice and now at 100%. Will be interesting to see how it goes. Just don't want it to get "stuck" again, refusing to charge past a certain percentage.

Will report back to this thread later.

Thanks again to ubuysa.
 
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