cmos battery

Dumb question here. Can a bad cmos battery keep the regular battery from charging? Gateway MX3562. Thanks, Pat

 

I can't say with absolute certainty that it couldn't, but I very seriously doubt it; those systems are very much unaffiliated.

The number 1 cause of a battery not charging is, in my experience, a bad battery. I've had a few batteries go out on me over the years to the point where they just won't hold a charge at all. This seems to happen overnight, especially in 'cheap' batteries on 'cheap' laptops (all of my issues were with low-end HP and Dell batteries). When this happens, my battery indicator would still show that it was charing, but it sure as heck wasn't. Do this: download RMClock and install it. When you run the program, there is a "battery info" section of the main menu that should give you lots of information about your dear 6-cell friend. What I'd be curious to know is what value it gives for the "total battery lifetime". Also, if you look at the sub-menu "Battery Device: [your battery]" it will give you two values of note: "fully charged capacity" and "designed capacity". If the fully charged number is really low you'll know the battery has essentially said goodbye.

My second suspect would be the charger. If you have a multi-meter handy, put it on the DC voltage setting and see if the adapter is supplying the voltage it is supposed to. I've had AC-DC transformers go bad in the past and just won't put out enough voltage for proper operation anymore. This is especially true for electronic devices (routers, stereos, etc.), but it also applies to PCs.

Coming back to your CMOS question, if you really think it could be the CMOS battery, well..... replace it =). They should only be a couple of bucks at Wal-mart, which I think is worth knowing if it's causing you grief or not. Hope this helps.

Edit: Come to think of it, see if your PC will boot without the CMOS battery in it. It only serves to store the settings, so I don't see why it wouldn't boot without it in, you just can't "save" the BIOS changes once you disconnect the power source.

Good luck!

-Steve

 

misterstev0 thanks for taking the time to respond to my post. I'm grasping at straws at this point with the issue of this laptop's refusal to charge batteries. Here's what I've already done:
New battery
New adapter
New DC Jack Board

Put a new motherboard in it yesterday but computer wouldn't boot so I put the old one back in and am thinking about trying another new one. I have a new cmos battery for the next time I tear it down.

I downloaded RMClock and here are some stats with the new battery that is in it:
Online, charging.
Total Battery Lifetime is N/A.
Fully charged capacity is 28860 mWh.
Remaining capacity is 11mWh (0%).
Designed capacity is 48840 mWh.
Battery charge remaining is 0%.
Battery life and time is N/A.

Do you think it could be the motherboard?

 

That really sounds like a dead cell in the battery or a short somewhere.........

 

got another new motherboard. battery charges now.