Battery discharges on AC Been there Done that

[gstrazds]

Hi folks; I have  a Battery will not charge problem which has shown up again...

Same as others have reported in this newsgroup...

Symptoms;

Discharged battery to any state 90% ~ 10% charges to full when AC plugged in first time.

Then AC still plugged in, AC power icon in the tray; Battery starts discharging !  Unplug ~ replug Battery will not recharge..
Turn off unplug ~ replug charges again..

Notebook works with the AC only no battery in unit
Notebook works with Battery only lasts several hours...

Appears to not be the Adapter connector issue or brick issue

Bios is now at F55; occurred when bios was at previous bios level

Puzzling that the issue might be a HP related Bios instruction set problem or restated HP still does not have the Bios right.

Empty battery slot makes a great hand hold..

How does one chase HP around to fix this. I don't recall giving HP an OK to charge me for their problems; design issues which are not resolved at time of purchase.

I quite like this X1360cl notebook I have here... At one point it was toast 2 months out of warranty salt water damage one line  3mm x 50mm bottom side of power area on MB..  

Weeks grumbling over the loss/wasting of 2K CDN and no Accident damage insurance which was not available at the time - Now is from some vendors

Took it apart; replaced a LM393 power chip now it works again..

Sincerely Glenn Strazds

[kf_man]

Hey, I'm not really sure what the problem is with your laptop.  There are some power issues that do occur with this model, but not any like yours that I'm aware of.  I don't believe that this is a BIOS issue specifically, but it could possibly be.

The only problem I have is that sometimes my computer forgets that it has the power cord plugged in and I have to shut down and turn on the computer to make it start working again.  This problem has only happened when using my port replicator which I got off of eBay.  The power port on the back is not great and frequently loses connections anyway, but even plugging the power into the side once this has happened will not charge the laptop again.

I'm not sure how much of a help I've been or can be to you, but I encourage you to visit the other X1000 forums at http://www.x1000forums.com/ since these forums were setup in the interim when the old ones were hacked.  I'm only currently still hosting this forum to maintain a database of useful data that I collected from Google cache when the forum was corrupted.  A lot of the interim posts at the other forum were lost, but there still are some active users there and almost none here, sadly   .

[gstrazds]

here are some power issues that do occur with this model, but not any like yours that I'm aware of. I don't believe that this is a BIOS issue specifically, but it could possibly be.

I read them.. appear to be the same as mine with a sub sets being;

Damaged DC line into the power connector on the side of the notebook, and the power brick being defective with a third possibility being the low voltage issue from plugging into airplane DC power sockets or an inverter... which by default causes the battery to flip into discharge mode.

Also the power connector in the motherboard being worn out cracked etc...

I ran this x1360cl off of (2) ~an inverter  that being 150w and 1000w; worked and still works

Unless the power management chip itself is failing in the "running on AC with a trickle charge feature" damaged while the rest of the features work including trickle charging while in hibernation mode.

maybe the inverter output not being a perfect sine wave caused just that section to break.. or my salt water damage also damaged just that function on the chip???

So who knows where the power management  chip is on the x1000 Mb?

since these forums were setup in the interim when the old ones were hacked. I'm only currently still hosting this forum to maintain a database of useful data that I collected from Google cache when the forum was corrupted. A lot of the interim posts at the other forum were lost, but there still are some active users there and almost none here, sadly

I thought I was joining the other forum... will do ... This is a most useful forum.. knowledge base

Upgrading my Cdr. to dual layer DVD/ RW 16650 NEC a newer one is available at New Egg;  and pondering the CPU upgrade 2.1 ghz dolathon $345.00 ebay, although at 1.5 ghz I can wait till it gets to a larger number; screen to

Thanks Glenn Strazds

[theurich]

Hey, I have the exact same issue that kf_man is describing with my X1230US except that I am not using a replicator. It just happens when I unplug the power supply on the side of the laptop and operate it without power supply for a while. Then when I come back and plug the supply back into the side jack the laptop LED does _not_ indicate that the battery is being charged. In fact the battery will run dry after a while. On the software side, however, the indicator in the system tray does change to indicate that the power supply was plugged back in.

The LED I am talking about is the one with the little flash symbol. During normal operation (i.e. when not in the faulty mode) this LED will only be on when the battery is installed. I can take the battery out and the LED will turn off, indicating that no battery is present and not being charged. So I figured that the problem may be with a battery that is going bad. To test this theory I went ahead and removed the battery from the laptop while it was in the faulty mode described above, expecting that the laptop should keep running fine, power being supplied by the external power supply. BUT instead the laptop turned off as if I had cut it off any power supply!!! So there goes this theory...

Has anybody received an official statement from HP about what could be the cause of this issue. It is really the only complaint I have with the X1000 but it sure is very annoying, especailly since it seems to happen more and more frequently.

Thanks,
*gjt*

[kf_man]

Well, I have not heard of any solution to the problem.  Mine occurred only with the port replicator, so it wasn't as bad.  Even so, once it went into that state using the port replicator, pluggin in on the side didn't work either.  The only way to get things going again was to shutdown or hibernate and then turn the computer back on.  As soon as the power to the computer goes off, the power modes should reset and start working again.  Other than that, I have no idea why this is happening.

[theurich]

I am chatting with an HP technician about this right now in the other window. She claims HP does not know of this issue but suggests a BIOS upgrade (of course). I am running Linux and they only support upgrading from Windows. Do you run Windows or Linux? What BIOS version do you use? Thanks,
*gjt*

[kf_man]

I run the latest BIOS available and I run Windows XP on my computer.  I believe the latest version is F.55.  One other thing to note is that this problem did occur with me at one point using the side power port, but that was due to a faulty power supply.  When I finally investigated the problem, the power supply was a little mangled and I eventually saw some copper coming through before it refused to work at all.  Since then, the side power connector has caused absolutely no problems.  I still have problems with my port replicator though, so my thought is that maybe the power circuitry is sensitive to input voltage.  It seems like in both cases (port replicator and side port), a loose connection caused this power issue.

[theurich]

Right, and it seems that once the power circuit thinks that something's bad about the power coming in it disables the jack. From there it takes a complete shut down to reset the circuit.

Thanks for the machine details. So upgrading to F.55 does not seem to fix this for you. Luckily hibernation is working for me, so it's not to bad dealing with this (as long as I catch it).

*gjt*

[gstrazds]

Right, and it seems that once the power circuit thinks that something's bad about the power coming in it disables the jack. From there it takes a complete shut down to reset the circuit.

I still have no additional progress on this; Picked up a couple mb's off ebay to make a working spare - got to investigate liquid damage - discovered that HP has an exclusive  on of the power chips LM3488 sot; msot version is the only version available on the street.

Could be the chip - still think bios; don't know..

Thanks for the machine details. So upgrading to F.55 does not seem to fix this for you. Luckily hibernation is working for me, so it's not to bad dealing with this (as long as I catch it).

*gjt*

What does "Lucky hibernation is working for me"??  works here..

I think your talking about the battery flipping to discharge ~ I let the battery charge up overnight while the notebook is off, then take it out in the morning...

My dual layer burner works great; This system has also not failed since for any "other" reason???

Glenn Strazds

[theurich]

Glenn,

My laptop is _never_ off. It's a real work horse (I do almost all of my development work on it). Every night there are several cron jobs that do various things from backing up to testing code. So there is really never a down time. Other than the intermittent power issue it has no problems!

My case is much more similar to kf_man's problem in that it does not happen very often. It also never happens while the power supply is plugged in and everything is happy. Only _after_ I have disconnected the power supply and then plugged back in does it every go into this strange mode of rejecting power from the side jack. So typically I check and make sure the LED in front goes on. If so all is fine. If not then I hibernate the machine and come back up right away (takes maybe 3 minutes) and all is fine again. However, it has happend two times in the past that I was in a hurry and plugged in the AC supply on the side jack and did not check the LED. When I came back the machine had run out of battery.

I still think the root of our problem is the same and I could see either the BIOS or the power chip being the cause here. Just that what you are seeing is much worse than what we experience.

*gjt*

[jonb123]

Ditto on all that - I have the same problem.  First boot up, all seems fine.  Power cord gets unplugged, then i plug back in, it says it's on AC power, but the battery drains.  Reboot starts the process all over again.  Pretty annoying.  I'll pay 1$ via paypal to anyone who has a fix!

Cha-ching.

[gstrazds]

new battery fixes this problem
Hi folks... Found the reason.

Battery! Just put a new battery in - This problem went away!

Old battery works? charges 4+ hours use etc.. excepting the problem

Thanks Glenn Strazds

[Rich]

Replacing the battery on my x1000 improved the situation, but did not completly solve the problem for me.  (I had already replaced the power cord.  That had no effect.)  The problem seemed to go away when I replaced the battery.  However, after about 8 hours of use, the battery began discharging again.  At first, wiggling the power cord in the PC socket helped for a while, but eventually the A/C would only work if I shut down the PC and restarted it.  Wiggling doesn't seem to have any effect anymore.  However, I don't think it's the power socket in the PC since I have the same problem when using the PC with the power cord connected through the dociking station.

I think this may be at least partially a Windows problem.  I have no problems when I boot from a Linux CD.  Also, I noticed that the battery driver file cmbatt.sys is not exactly the same as a back-up copy I made before the "battery discharges on AC" problem began.  I tried replacing it with the back up version of the file.  That seemed to fix the problem for a fraction of a second, but Windows immediately reverted right back to the bad version.  (I'm not sure how to stop Windows from reverting to the bad cmbatt.sys file.  I understand Windows maintains a hidden cache and "repairs" system files when they change.)

Rich

[kf_man]

That's very interesting, I haven't had the problem in a while actually, not since I had my bad power cord.  It could also be that I've been home for the summer and rarely disconnect power from my laptop, I'm not sure.  Either way, the only thing that has changed recently was the new power cord and since then everything has been fine.  I don't know what else it could be.

In answer to your question before, there is a File Protection scheme that windows has, but it usually notifies you before it does it and allows you to ignore it.  Is there any sort of notification that this is happening?

[Rich]

In answer to your question before, there is a File Protection scheme that windows has, but it usually notifies you before it does it and allows you to ignore it.  Is there any sort of notification that this is happening?

No warning.  The file just changes and the date/time stamp reverts to a different time, but same date as my original file.

Rich