Hi I bought a brand new Asus Q550L notebook from Bestbuy the other day and I removed Windows 8 from it and replaced it with Ubuntu. Now the battery won't charge. It is sitting at 45% capacity, if I unplug from the mains it will use the battery, it also claims to be charging, but it's been plugged in for over 24 hours now and the charge hasn't increased from 45%.
Is it just a faulty battery? Could the fault be with Ubuntu? Could it be a problem with a BIOS setting? (I was fiddling with BIOS to get Ubuntu installed, it uses UEFI).
I would appreciate any suggestions or advice. Thanks.
More details:
I don't believe that the fault is with Ubuntu; if I shut down the laptop and leave it plugged in for an hour or so and then turn it on again then it still shows a capacity of 45%. Also if I press F2 to get in to the BIOS menu on start up it doesn't appear to charge then either.
I don't know if it ever charged under Windows 8. I don't know if it came with a full battery or not. Yesterday I tried to test this by reinstalling Windows from the recovery disk and system image I'd made prior to installing Ubuntu, but it didn't work. It repartitioned the drive and replaced all of the files but failed at the last minute with a warning about too many indistinguishable items, or something like that. After that it would not boot at all but went to a 'grub recovery' prompt; so I reinstalled Ubuntu. This is probably a different question entirely but if the battery is faulty I'll have to find out how to reinstall Windows in order to return the laptop to the store.
UPDATE:
I spent some time trying to re-install windows, and failed. But while I was doing that the battery started to work again! After exhausting all possibilities at re-installing windows I gave up and re-installed Ubuntu. Yesterday I used Ubuntu all day with the laptop plugged in, the battery remained fully charged. Last night I used the laptop without the battery for a few hours, and drained it to around 60%. This morning I turned on my laptop and the battery wasn't recognised. I shut down my laptop and tried to turn it back on without the power adapter; it wouldn't turn on, but did do something so it was getting some small amount of power from somewhere. Then I plugged it back in and turned it on, and I'm back to the original situation regarding the battery not charging.
So my two possibilities are: either there is a loose connection, and it's just a coincidence that when it fails it has been failing under Ubuntu; or Ubuntu's battery driver simply does not know how to charge the battery.
Either way I think I will have to return the laptop to the store and hope that they take pity on me and don't make a deal about the Ubuntu thing.
Best Answer
If you were to turn the computer off with the power plugged in, it should charge no problem.
But as far as while you're on ubuntu, try using the upower command/utility to see if you can get the battery to charge.
Also, to double check, try installing another flavor of Linux to see if you run into the same issue.