Question Battery can't charge to 100% and keeps trying - is this safe?

[anonymous87]

Hi,

My laptop battery will not charge past 93% and before I start troubleshooting it, I wanted to ask about how long I have to deal with this - is it critical or can it wait? I don't post a lot, so please forgive me if I've made any mistakes in posting. Also, if this question has been answered somewhere else already and I didn't find it, please point me to the thread - thank you.

I noticed today that my charging light (a red light) on my laptop (an older Asus, an Eee PC) is on, but I haven't been using the battery at all - I usually keep the machine plugged in all the time and only use the battery every great once in a while (it also helps in the rare case where the power goes out). I did some various internet searches and there's a lot of advise on how to try to resolve the problem, but I did not see the answer to my most important question, which is if I just keep it in this state for a while (continually trying to charge past 93%, just letting the red light stay on) if that will cause a problem or not. I do not feel any excess heat coming from the machine, which I assume would be one of the main concerns.

It seems to me that perhaps I could simply remove the battery for now and it would have power just like a desktop unless there is something I do not know about how the power-related hardware on this laptop interacts with the ability to use a battery. I haven't been using the battery directly, anyway (again, I usually keep the machine plugged in most of the time). Unfortunately, my searches have turned up conflicting information about if it is safe to do so or not, and none make specific reference my particular laptop model. For laptops in general, some posts said this was ok. However, some did not. For example, one post I read said that for some laptops it isn't safe to run without the battery due to possible power fluctuations or some such, but it would seem to me the same issue would exist with any desktop unless they are referring to something specific in the power-related hardware design of laptops (related to the battery support) - ?

There are a lot of troubleshooting steps that I've come across and it sounds like going through them all will take quite a while. I have a lot of fairly serious stuff going on right now and therefore only would want to deal with this right now if it were very urgent, in other words, if the continual charging attempt could risk damaging the laptop. I somewhat suspect the battery has a problem (another machine had a problem the other day, a few days after a lightning storm even though all of them were are on surge protectors), but I don't know that for sure.

I did read that there are tools for some laptops to stop it from charging past a particular point (charges to a max) which would seem another good way to solve this, but apparently they are specific to each laptop and I wasn't able to find one for mine. (That said, when I first got the laptop years ago, I did carefully disable some of the excess installed software to streamline it, so it is possible one of those would have provided this capability - I'd have to try to remember how to re-enable and check each of them one by one, but no internet searches said anything about such a tool so I suspect this would be a waste of effort. But if someone here already knows if there is one, it would help significantly.)

Similarly, I saw some references to completely turning off use of the battery while it is still connected, but again I could not find information for how to do this for my machine.

So to summarize my questions:
1 - Will leaving it trying to charge past 93% (but never succeeding) cause any problem?
2 - Will simply removing the battery entirely and running the machine without it cause any problems?
3 - Does anyone know of a tool for my machine (Asus Eee PC) that will limit the battery charging process, or a way to turn off use of the battery completely?

Any advise would be greatly appreciated - thanks!


(To clarify the problem I mentioned earlier, there was a lightning storm nearby the other day. I wasn't in a situation to be able to turn either machine off at the time and I suspect the power never went out (no clocks had to be reset). A deskop was on and my laptop was plugged in but it was automatically in low power mode. Both were on surge protectors, in 2 different rooms. A few days later I was using a remote loggin tool to the desktop when it suddenly disappeared and when I went into the other room to check why, I found that the mouse and keyboard to that machine had power, but there was no display on the monitor, and the power supply fan wasn't running (that machine's power supply fan is always supposed to run; it isn't one that ever slows down or stops) and it was way too hot, so I quickly disconnected the machine (again, that is the desktop). Now, about a few more days later I suddenly, suspiciously have found my laptop's charging light on continually and it not getting past 93%. I can only suspect something either happened in the lightning storm or it is a big coincidence both machines suddenly started acting up within a few days of each other. I also had the power go out briefly fairly recently when the power company did some work. I also had a circuit breaker go off when there was a short in a light caused by a squirrel eating the wire (separate circuit from the computers), repaired 2 days later. With all of that going on and that desktop having hardware problems soon thereafter, this is why I suspect the battery on the laptop may be bad.)

 

[jsmithepa]

TL;DR

Battery health (%) and Charge Cycles Count important.

 

[anonymous87]

TL;DR

Battery health (%) and Charge Cycles Count important.

Thanks for the reply. Sorry it was a lengthy post but I've always felt it is much better to provide too much info rather than too little. I did try to go in priority order of info top-to-bottom of that post, and my questions come down to:

1 - Will leaving it trying to charge past 93% (but never succeeding) cause any problem?
2 - Will simply removing the battery entirely and running the machine without it cause any problems?
3 - Does anyone know of a tool for my machine (Asus Eee PC) that will limit the battery charging process, or a way to turn off use of the battery completely?

I'm still looking around for where to find battery health % and charge cycles count, having some trouble because a lot of the recommended methods do not seem to work on XP/Home (powercfg is there but doesn't seem to support the necessary options). I'll keep looking for where to find it, but I've been looking for quite a while now so if you see this and happen to know, I'd appreciate it - thank

Thanks for your help

 

[anonymous87]

Finally found it, had to download BatteryInfoView.

The results are:

Battery Health: 75.5%
Number of charge/discharge cycles*: 0

*: If this is not the correct field, please let me know - thanks

 

[anonymous87]

After being is low power mode for the last 6 or 7 hours, it is now down to 92% (BatteryInfoView says 92.7 and the Battery Health and cycles are unchanged). In other words, it seems to actually be slowly losing charge.

 

[anonymous87]

I called Asus and asked directly about running the machine without the battery; the person I spoke to said it was safe to do so and that it would not damage the power-related hardware. Hopefully he was correct, because I am doing so right now. But my original questions still remain (including this one to verify what the Asus support rep said as correct), so any help would be appreciated - thanks in advance

FYI, the battery charge continued to slowly drop after my prior post (I think it was down to something like 92.2% last I checked).

Now I have one more question: If I purchase a 3rd party brand replacement, is there a brand that tends to be better than another? Asus refuses to sell me a battery directly, claiming that other sellers have authentic Asus batteries for my machine. But from my search results, this is wrong; they don't. So given that my only option seems to be a 3rd party battery, which brand is likely to be the best? The few that had any reasonable number of reviews all had a number of negative ones, and the rest had very few reviews or were not reviewed at all. I'd also appreciate any help on this issue - thanks in advance

 

[Mr5oh]

I called Asus and asked directly about running the machine without the battery; the person I spoke to said it was safe to do so and that it would not damage the power-related hardware. Hopefully he was correct, because I am doing so right now. But my original questions still remain (including this one to verify what the Asus support rep said as correct), so any help would be appreciated - thanks in advance

FYI, the battery charge continued to slowly drop after my prior post (I think it was down to something like 92.2% last I checked).

Now I have one more question: If I purchase a 3rd party brand replacement, is there a brand that tends to be better than another? Asus refuses to sell me a battery directly, claiming that other sellers have authentic Asus batteries for my machine. But from my search results, this is wrong; they don't. So given that my only option seems to be a 3rd party battery, which brand is likely to be the best? The few that had any reasonable number of reviews all had a number of negative ones, and the rest had very few reviews or were not reviewed at all. I'd also appreciate any help on this issue - thanks in advance

The rep is correct. There is no harm in running the machine without a battery. As for brands, I've had a little better luck with the brand name replacements like Rayovac and such if there is one available for your notebook. I've used some of the eBay generics and they work, but they don't have the run time or lifespan of the OEM. That being said said usually the "brand name" ones are at least double the price if not more so pickn your poison I guess.