Windows – Lenovo Laptop won’t charge above 59%

No. External power alone is not enough for all cases. Many laptops only work at full capacity if they have a battery and external power. This is because the external power supply can only provide 70-90W but the machine may need 100+W when CPU spikes high and the HD/DVD is spinning. Having the battery on board allows the machine to sip from the battery when needed and charge it back up when not.

Original chargers often implement a protocol to tell the laptop that they support sufficient power (=Watt) to charge the laptop. If the laptop can't tell that it will have enough power it will go into a low power state where it doesn't charge the laptop.

This can happen because:

• The charger can't deliver enough power.
• The charger is broken and can't tell the laptop that it delivers enough power.
• The charger doesn't know how to tell the laptop that it can deliver enough power.
• The laptop part that should listen to the charger is broken.
• A software/driver failure.

Quite often the problem is the charger. Try to borrow an original charger from someone to test it.

Edit: If e.g. the new charger is 90W and the old charger is 120W, the expected behavior is that the battery will not charge, even if both chargers are from HP.