Your battery is probably dead, but here are a few things you can try:
- Perform an ATX reset. Remove all power (battery + power lead) and hold the on button down for 30 seconds.
- In
control panel > power management
(or the equivalent from XP) turn off the options "shutdown / standby when battery critically low" or similar, so Windows will never try to turn itself off when the battery is low.
- Run the battery right down (probably not that difficult :D)
- Leave it plugged in for 16 hours.
- Start her up on battery alone and
see how far you get.
Repeat steps 3, 4 and 5 if you notice your laptop stays alive for longer and longer periods of time as suggested in step 5.
If this isn't successful you have effectively diagnosed a dead battery.
With a similar laptop, I tried everything.... so I contacted Asus, and they said:
Based on what you explained, we recommend that you first try a hard reset on the device, then reinstall the battery driver for the device to see if any changes are observed with the device.
Here are the steps to Hard Reset:
- Please ensure the unit is powered off.
- Remove the power cord and all other peripherals inserted into the unit (E.g. Mouse, keyboard etc.)
- Press and hold the power button for at least 45 - 60 seconds
- Re-insert power cord and attempt to turn unit on.
In my case, I had already tried that, and I had already tried resetting the drivers in every way I could possibly find...
Also, in my case, the laptop battery is not intended to be removed, so I didn't try removing it since I didn't want to void the warranty.
Also, my laptop was around 3% battery, and since it wouldn't charge, it wouldn't let me perform updates because the battery was too dead, even when the laptop was plugged in.
However, something I noticed was that when I tried to walk through the steps, after letting up on the power button, the laptop would turn on whereas some of the other reports I read online indicated that their laptops would produce the faint sound of the hard drive spinning up and then forcibly shutting off. (It's pretty unmistakable if you know what to listen for, but the sound is faint enough that you might not notice it if you don't know what it sounds like.)
So, I decided to unplug the device, and I intended to let it sit for a few days before trying to reset the power, but I ended up not getting around to it for at least a few weeks. Anyway, after the time had passed, I assumed that the battery was probably finally totally and completely dead. I pressed down the power button and held it down for a full 60 seconds, but after around 15 seconds (without letting up the power button), I noticed that unmistakable but faint sound of the hard drive spinning up and then shutting down almost instantly.
When I then plugged in the laptop and turned it on, to my astonishment, it was actually finally charging!
Since the laptop's lithium battery permanently loses its capacity every time it is completely drained to 0%, I highly recommend avoiding allowing it to ever drain to empty (to the extent that is possible).
"Using only 20% or 30% of the battery capacity before recharging will
extend cycle life considerably. . . Full discharge cycles (down to 2.5
V or 3 V, depending on chemistry) should be avoided if possible."
(Hofiart, F. (2008). Proper care extends Li-ion battery life. Power
Electronics, 25. At:
http://mail.lancaironline.net:81/Lists/lml/Message/56976-02-B/Li-Ion%20Battery%20Life.pdf
)
Also:
"Li-ion batteries can be severely damaged by deep discharge, i.e. by
discharging them below the minimum voltage threshold recommended by
the manufacturer (usually 2.7 V for a single cell)"
(Saha, B., & Goebel, K. (2009, September). Modeling Li-ion battery capacity depletion in a particle filtering framework. In Proceedings of the annual conference of the prognostics and health management society (pp. 2909-2924). San Diego, CA. At: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kai_Goebel/publication/284154682_Modeling_Li-ion_battery_capacity_depletion_in_a_particle_filtering_framework/links/5669f23208ae1a797e3782e5.pdf )
However, with that warning, in this case, it might still be worth trying the approach that I took if you have not found a solution and have exhausted all of the other available options.
Best Answer
If you've left it on charge but not running for a day or two, and there was no improvement, then try resetting battery charging.
First check the Avell manual for instructions. If there are none, the general procedure for resetting charging is:
On the aforementioned HP, I needed to repeat the process once before it corrected the "connected but not charging" issue.
Hope this helps!