Gateway MD78 series laptops have a battery problem.

And I'm not the only one who is experiencing it. Prepare yourself for a long read. D:

I bought my laptop, a Gateway MD-7811u about 9 months ago. It worked great up until about April, when a few of the keys on the keyboard literally broke off for no apparent reason, and I noticed some of the pixels in my screen were dead. I contacted Gateway about this, and they repaired the keyboard under warranty, refusing to change the screen. The other downside to that was I had to ship my laptop halfway across the country, and it was gone for a couple of weeks.

It kept on working alright up until yesterday. I'd been using it for a few hours when I noticed the battery icon (I'm using windows 7) read that there was no power in the battery. This was weird because I'd been charging the battery sense I started using it that day. (It was still charging when I noticed the problem.) Windows 7 tells me that the battery has "0% power remaining (Plugged in, not charging)", yet the laptop will run without being plugged in for 2-3 hours, after which it just shuts off without warning from a lack of power. After completely draining and recharging the battery, as full as I could charge it without knowing how much power it actually had, the problem persisted. Today, I went looking for an answer to this problem, and discovered a page on the Gateway website that listed a laptop almost identical to mine. (Same series, the only difference was a different DVD drive.)

In more then half of the almost 40 reviews, people were complaining about the same problem. Some of them had even sent their laptops in to Gateway multiple times, and every time the problem was back within a few months. You can check out the reviews at this page, by clicking on "customer reviews".

Gateway Official Site: Shop - Notebooks – MD7820u Laptop Product Details

I find it kind of ridiculous that they haven't addressed a problem that so many people have complained about. (And those are only the people who bothered to go and post their experience on that page. Which is near impossible to find unless you come in from a Google search.) Does anyone on here know someone with one of these laptops who have had the same problem? Or have had it themselves?

 

Sounds strange, though a simple workaround for your issue would be to use a hardware monitoring program like HWMonitor to view your battery life (as well as hardware temps).

CPUID - System & hardware benchmark, monitoring, reporting

 

I had the same problem, which I think I just fixed.

Plugged in my iPod for charging without the computer plugged in, and when the battery conked out, connected the AC plug.

Now my computer tells me it is "plugged in, charging". It's up to 34%, where before it wouldn't even charge!

Remembered a problem I had with a hand vac, where the battery wanted to be "challenged" every month (still haven't fixed that one, but...)

Hope this helps!