Question Replacement laptop battery behaving weirdly ?

[tewharvey]

Hi

A few months ago I had my Razer 15 battery replaced my a computer repair guy. Suffice to say, he overcharged me and clearly didn't do a good job - but that's irrelevant.

The Issue:

1. Most of the time, I have to plug in my laptop to use it.
2. The battery reads "100%, charging", but when I unplug the laptop, it turns off.
3. Even though it shows this status on the system tray, on the lock screen it gives an icon of a battery crossed out, suggesting it is not detected.
4. Twice now, I have got the battery to charge successfully up to a point. The first time it reached 11%, the second time it reached 30%.
5. Last time, it started charging after I downloaded the "BatteryCare" program.
6. As soon as I booted this program up, my laptop started charging normally, and BatteryCare showed all normal diagnostics.
7. It continued to show normal performance up to 30% charge, at which point my PC refused to charge any further, even though it said it was charging.
8. Interestingly, after I stopped charging the laptop, it kept showing 30% charge until eventually my PC ran out of battery. This suggests that for whatever reason, my laptop was not properly reading the real charge of the battery.
9. Having run out that final time, my laptop is back to only working when it is plugged in, and showing 100% in the system tray and no battery found on the lock screen.

Help?
I hope this is a basic fix and the answer is not "the PC repair man gave you a dodgy battery", because I can't do anything about that now. Thanks in advance for any help, and I hope I have explained myself clearly.

Attached is a useful image from BatteryCare, giving its current diagnostics:

https://imgur.com/mBJ9UDH

View: https://imgur.com/mBJ9UDH

 

[helpstar]

Try this:

https://mysupport.razer.com/app/ans...attery-is-either-not-charging-or-not-detected

 

[tewharvey]

Try this:

https://mysupport.razer.com/app/ans...attery-is-either-not-charging-or-not-detected

Already tried that

---

Having unplugged battery and plugged it back in again, the laptop is stuck on very low charge (0%) but won't go above - it lasts about 30 secs unplugged. Also the diagnostics say it's charging, but it clearly isn't...

 

[helpstar]

what technical data is written on the battery? voltage, wattage?

 

[BFG-9000]

Much like phone batteries, laptop batteries are often pushed hard enough (primarily by charging each cell past 4.20v) to require frequent replacement, in order to provide good runtime numbers for reviews. They don't care if that means the battery only lasts 12-18 months, that runtime number helps sales! Look at this chart showing how a 5-10% increase in initial capacity results in a huge dropoff in charge cycles: https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries
What happens is one cell will go low and charging stops as soon as the first cell reaches ~4.25v. If the pack gets really imbalanced this can be below 30% and if a cell is dead it's below 10%. Sorry but it's a dud pack, which you might be able to revive temporarily by opening it up and manually rebalancing the cells (but something caused it to go out of balance in the first place--usually one cell with more self-discharge than the others, so this is usually only very temporary unless you replace that cell)

With Razer it's typically $80 and ~5min of DIY time to replace the whole battery every year. By the time capacity starts dropping the cells are under such stress that they have often puffed up enough from outgassing to affect the touchpad.

 

[geofelt]

Likely, the tech replaced your battery with a "compatible" battery that was missing something like a chip to control charging.

Buy only a replacement of the exact same part number that you originally had.
Yes, it will cost more.