Laptop Battery power up issue?

Laptop Battery power up issue?

Hi everyone, Two weeks ago I was on the road and my 6 month old laptop seemed to die. It was suggested by a few members here that my battery probably died.

I followed a procedure where I removed the battery and held the power button down for a few minutes. I tried that a few times and had no luck.

I am now off the road and have purchased a internal SATA HDD enclosure. Today, I intended to pull the drive and make a final backup before sending the laptop in for warranty repair.

I haven't had the machine out of it's carry bag for 10 days.

On a lark  thought I'd pull the battery again and give it a try. Pow! The system booted right up.

So, I think I might be ok and just need a new battery.

What's the deal with these batteries? Is this a common issue?

Is power savings somehow involved? I am trying to think through why something had to clear on the motherboard before the system would boot. It seems like there must be some sort of hard reset on the motherboard... and that the "push power button for two minutes" procedure is some sort of substitute.

Any thoughts?

What should I tell Toshiba about my battery?

Thanks very much,
mike

This may or may not be of help / use to you ...
 
There have been a RASH of complaints around the globe about batteries lately - mostly on systems running Windows 7.  I can attest there are some problems from first hand experience on my 2 laptops.
 
Here are the 2 things that have been most reported, from what I gather:
 
1- The battery will be plugged in but say "not charging"
2- The battery, even after calibration, shuts down the system with a remaining charge of over 90%.
 
I had both those things happen on 2 different systems.   It's not JUST on Windows 7 machines, just mostly it seems.
 
It turns out there was a solution for both - and a battery I thought had died was, in fact, still very good -- even though I spent over 100 bucks (shipping, tax, etc) getting a new one (sigh).
 
Solutions:
 
For problem #1, go into DEVICE MANAGER.  Under the BATTERY category, delete the "ACPI Compliant Control Method Battery" and if there are 2, delete them both.   It's ok - Windows will automatically reinstall them.   Be on AC power with the battery in the laptop when doing this.
 
That should solve the "plugged in - not charging" issue.
 
For problem #2, go into Control Panel - Power settings - Advanced (this may differ on XP vs Windows 7, but each should have a way to adjust advanced power settings).   You'll be looking for the way Windows handles notifications and management of low power level warnings and actions for "Battery".
 
In my case - the settings got "magically" changed to some rediculous value for both the low-level warning and the critical-level warning and management.  
 
NORMAL settings are roughly 10% for "low level" warning, and 5% for "critical level" warning -- with "hybernate" set as the action to take when critical level is below 5%.    Again, this is the NORMAL and usually DEFAULT settings.
 
It seems a LOT of users have discovered that, out of the blue, these values got changed to "98%" for low level and "95%" for critical, and "shut down" for action.
 
WTF????    Yeah that's what I said when I discovered these settings seemed to have changed after a "windows update" !
 
At any rate, before you throw out your possibly good battery, check both those scenarios.   If you're lucky, your battery is just fine and you'll begin to wonder why/how that happens, eh?
 
I'm much more cynical these days about the ways users can be manipulated via technology (Microsoft has often used their updates to mess things up when it's time to get people to upgrade!).
 
Anyway, check those settings.  Maybe you'll get lucky like I did to find they were wrong, and you can correct them yourself.
 
HTH
 

I suspect it was stuck in hibernation. Most laptops will hibernate automatically by default if the power gets low, and some have problems waking up. The flag that is set to tell windows not to boot from the hard drive normally, but to read the hibernation file into memory and start, and for some reason when it tries to do that the wake up sequence fails. Attaching line power might override this problem. You might want to set your power saving up so that the machine never hibernates.

Your manual should have the location of the reset button. Sometimes this is accessed through a small hole on the back using a paper clip. That will do a warm reboot to a running machine, but I would not expect it to do anything for a machine that is off or hibernating. Detatching the power and the battery will kill an active machine (running or suspended?), but will leave you in an undefined state--a last ditch measure in a machine that will not shut down. Holding the power button down for several seconds will sometimes force a power off of a running machine or resume one from suspend or hibernate.

google: "laptop boot hibernate battery"
http://laptopforums.toshiba.com/t5/Batteries-and-Power/Boot-failure-after-battery-drain/m-p/88672

The other thing I have noticed is that my computer thinks it is Aug 20th 2009 and the clock is about 12 hours off.

Is that a clue?

I was thinking that as well.

I have to go get my packaging and docs etc.

best,
mike

Hi Billy,
 Here's a screen shot:

i Billy, Here's a screen shot:

 
Mike,
 
Those certainly look correct.
 
 

Replace the CMOS (BIOS) battery and then reset any customized BIOS entries and go from there.  On most Desktops it's a CR2032 battery.  On many laptops (depending on age) it's a different battery.

Being under warranty, I wouldn't even screw with it.  I'd call Toshiba and let them straighten it out.

I also wonder if the procedure where I held down the power button for a few minutes reset my bios clock? It seems to be keeping time now... so perhaps I forced a reset? perhaps the battery is ok?

Your bios clock would have had to have a reference to reset to if it were wrong in the first place. If you reset the system time manually while the OS is running, that would usually reset the BIOS/hardware clock. If you did not. unless you connected to the internet and had an application running to update system time via an online clock, how did it figure out what time it is? So rather than resetting the bios clock, it is more likely that the bios clock was never wrong, but that the system time was off.

Remember that you are usually seeing "system time" not "bios time" when you are looking at your screen. Although the bios time is usually reporting to the OS and acts as the source timekeeper, when you hibernate you are putting the system state into a file on the drive. That system state includes the time when the hibernation occurred. Sometimes the system fails to update the system time from the hardware clock when resuming from hibernation.

My wife's Toshiba laptop has a small switch that actuates when you shut the cover. What action that switch takes is programmable, so shutting the case can cause the system to shut down, hibernate or suspend.

Ya don't send in your laptop unless it's good and broken.
My daughters Sony laptop hard drive failed while still under warranty They do not do data recovery or give you the old drive. They just swap parts and redo OS to original. It was Vista ( hated it)  and she had upgraded to W7 and she offered the disks but they cant do that either. So after we recovered most of the files she took it back to Sony. They had it for 3 weeks and then we had to re install W7. Next time she will just buy the parts and do it at home.