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Laptop power issuesFollow

#1 Dec 07 2011 at 7:39 PM Rating: Excellent
Meat Popsicle
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So our Gateway laptop is almost 3 years old and has a couple of issues.

Issue 1:

Manifested itself about a year ago plus. The battery wont really hold much of a charge. The little battery indicator icon on the taskbar shows 0% available, plugged in, not charging. We can unplug it, and it'll run for a little while, but anything more than a few minutes and we lose power. Although the Mrs. recalls there's been a couple of times she's unplugged it and it then says the battery is full. She hasn't left it unplugged for a long while to test that though.

Issue 2:

Just started happening in the last week or so. If we leave the laptop on (while plugged in of course) it will eventually go into sleep mode. This is fine and intended, however afterward we can't always get it to "wake back up," we have to turn the computer off by holding down the power button. Upon reboot the screen may not always come back either. So you can hear the thing churning away, but the screen is "off." If we leave the computer off for an hour or two it'll come back just fine, but this is definably on the annoying side.

Final thoughts:

It's still a pretty decent computer, so we'd like to fix the problems if at all possible. I'm going to spring for a new machine, but was hoping to replace our sad excuse for a desktop first. I'm kind of guessing we need a new battery, however I'm reluctant to pay for one if Issue #2 is completely unrelated, and the thing is in need of a more serious overhaul.

Anyway does anyone have any thoughts on these problems? Think they are related or not? Anything I can do on my end? Time to cut my losses?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Smiley: flowers
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#2 Dec 07 2011 at 8:14 PM Rating: Excellent
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1. Batteries get old, after about a year or so they start degrading, especially if they spend alot of time on the desk plugged in and constantly microcharging. You need a new one.

2. There are numerous volumes of reasons that things don't come back from sleep mode. It probably isn't related to your battery issue. It's likely software and a reload would fix the issue. I would really reccommend just disabling sleep mode though. a laptop in screen saver doesn't draw that much more electricity than one in sleep mode, and it has a heck of a lot better chance of wakeing up. You can always set the monitor and disks to shut off too. If electricity and being "green" for the environment is your primary concern, you should buy a newer, more electrically efficient one anyways so I wouldn't worry about it.

None of my computers I ever build, deploy, or service have sleep mode enabled. Especially on laptops.
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#3 Dec 08 2011 at 10:05 AM Rating: Excellent
Meat Popsicle
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Alrighty then a new battery it is then. I've got sleep mode turned off and the Mrs. is going to let me know if she has any problems with it now. Much thanks Kao. Smiley: grin

I'd rate you up, but you know.
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#4 Dec 08 2011 at 2:28 PM Rating: Good
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Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
None of my computers I ever build, deploy, or service have sleep mode enabled. Especially on laptops.


^ biggest reason for me is I can't RDP back to my home pc from work if it goes into sleep mode.
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