Boot Camp + Vista - Plugged in Not Charging

I have Vista on Boot Camp which I need to run Visual Studio 6 and I have noticed that the battery icon says "plugged in, not charging" when I run on battery power. Does everyone have this issue or can it be fixed?

 

Well, first I have two questions for you. Why are you using Visual Studio when there's so much better stuff out there? Second, why not just use XP?

To answer your question I have heard that Vista does crazy things to the battery(some report their battery draining in half an hour), I haven't heard of it not being able to charge. You may want to make sure you don't have a defective battery(not sure if those were in the macbooks or just the pros).

edit: I read your post wrong. I did see some people mention that somewhere, but I can't seem to find the discussion. I believe there was a patch(maybe they said there will be). Unless this is causing an actual problem with the operation of the system, I wouldn't worry about it too much.

 

read what he said, when its on battery it says plugged in and not charging, yeah it says that on my friends mac book who i installed vista for, its ok, i think thought eventually it went away or i did something, and its not doesnt do it anymore but i dont remember

 

Ah ok. I guess I'll leave it for a bit and see if anything changes. I don't use Vista much so I was just wondering what was up.

The reason I'm using Vista is because I got a licence for it and it'd be a shame to waste it. =P

Also I need Visual Studio because that's what my class is doing, so pretty much it's just for compatibility reasons.

 

Whats better, and for what purpose?

 

When I run Vista on Boot Camp I also notice that the battery meter in Vista says that it is still charging, even though that the little green light shows up on the power plug. I believe this is OK, and that nothing is really wrong with it. I haven't (yet) experienced problems with the battery draining insanely fast when running Vista, or even XP (there is a slightly shorter battery life than what you get when running OSX though, by about a half hour for me).

Visual Studio is a great product. Sure it has its quirks here and there but overall it is one of the best development environments to work with, especially with the .NET Framework. Now, there are lots of other tools available also, such as Sharp Develop (which is free), but many find Visual Studio to be more polished. Even the Express versions of Visual Studio (free also with a simple registration) are nicely equipped.

 

i found that when in vista plugged it says im running off battery as well, all i do to fix it is unplug for a second then plug back in and the icon changes, to plugged in. hope that helps.

 

I want to know what you suggest other than VS...

 

Cool, I'm going to try that.

 

Wow, bring up an old thread just to hassle me about Visual Studio?

In response to what's better:
Just about anything. I personally use the miniGW compiler for C++, and Eclipse for Java. Everything else I work with uses its own environment.
My reason for not liking Visual Studio:
Speed. I once wrote a program just to test the speed of the two different systems(low level bit work), and the Bloodshed's Dev C++(with miniGW) ran about 4 times faster than VS. Visual Studio just adds so much overhead into things, it's ridiculous.

 

I had the same problem with vista today (it said 0% available, plugged in and not charging). I called the tech support guy for my laptop and asked him how to fix it. He directed me to a page that gave me an update for my BIOS. As soon as I updated my BIOS, my battery started charging again. The tech support guy said that your regular software is updated all the time but your BIOS must be given permission to update. Sometimes the new software updates are not compatible with your old BIOS version. In some cases this causes your computer not to recognize your battery as chargable. this causes your battery to drain its power and not charge. You guys might try the same thing that I did. You will just go to the support page for your laptop and type in the model number of your computer. You will then go to the downloads section and look under BIOS to see if a new update is available. If there is one, download and install it then restart your computer. The battery should then start charging if the problem had to do with the old BIOS.

*** Note. This solution will only work if the problem is not with the battery itself.

 

aaronmic,

Welcome to the forums . Thanks for your post, but this thread is over 3 months old now, and generally we don't like reviving old threads.