What battery won't charge!

Ok, so I was using my laptop (Z63a) unplugged yesterday, and it discharged down to around 50% or so. I plugged it in and it sat, off and charging, overnight, but when I woke up today, the charge light was still on, and the battery info read 98% charged. Anyway, I thought that I would just run a battery recalibration, so I started that, and went out. Upon returning about 6 hours later, the calibration was still trying to CHARGE the battery! I powered the unit off, took the battery out to check the pins, which looked fine, cleaned the bit of dust that had collected in there out, and rebooted. Now my battery only shows as 0% (which was caused by the aborted calibration, I assume). Other than that, the notebook seems to run just fine.

Any ideas as to what the heck has happened?

 

Smart Chip within the battery just went a little bonkers, this is quite known. For example, my notebook things it has 90% charge, it truely is 100%, so sometimes I just restart the notebook, or just turn off the notebook, then turn it back on and it will say 100% charge.

Other than that it could also be the ACPI.

Overall nothing to worry about, its not a big problem, technically the battery should be charged to 100% despite the readouts given by software programs.

 

seems like when you do that battery calibration you should let the battery run down really low before starting it. Then it will ask you to charge it, then remove the Ac and allow it to run down. that seems to work best for me.

insane

 

would the zero charge reading from the software program be because I aborted the calibration process? I let the thing sit for another ~5 hours on the BIOS battery calibration screen and it still says "Please wait, it is charging the battery."

I've also powered the thing off after this first started and removed the battery entirely. Same symptoms.

We recently had the power go out for about 15 minutes here, although that was several days before this weird behaviour started, and I would think that surge damage would be evident right away.

Any suggestions as to what I should do are appreciated. I was thinking of buying a new battery anyway, would that likely alleviate the problem?

 

well, good news.

I turned off the automated actions when the battery state reaches critical, and let the bugger run down for about a half hour, but this didn't seem to have an effect. then I plugged the mains back in, and removed the battery while the machine was on. let it sit for about five minutes like that, then plugged the battery back in.

the battery charge indicator shot up to 100%, then down to 0% and charging, although it was going up. so I shut the machine down for the night, and when I woke up this morning, the charge light was off, and things look to be back to normal. huzzah!