WAH!

April 11, 2009 2:38 AM

My HP Pavillion dv6000 laptop works fine...except for one little battery related thing.

You know the battery icon on the screen? On the bottom left - yeah that one.... It always shows at being 5% remaining, plugged in and charging (which it is, and has been for about...the last two months) but I never the less, ever gains any battery power. Sometimes when I startup its at full, but then when everything starts up properly it falls immediately down to 5 percent again. Its annoying because now im scared to remove it from the power....

My google has failed me. Any ideas Mefis?

posted by Neonshock to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Isn't this more likely a failure of the battery itself than the indicator? As in, ebay might be the most logical thing to search next.

Weirdly I had a similar situation on another HP laptop and was convinced the battery was dead. I did the following:

1. Restart with no battery - verify that everything else appears normal
2. Check all the connections between computer and battery
3. Carefully re-insert the battery

And now it's a-ok. But I think mine was a fluke and meant that something was screwy in how I'd inserted it previously.
posted by kaydo at 3:57 AM on April 11

might not be related, but note that there is an extended warranty on some dv6000s due to a known fault.
posted by jcwilliams at 4:01 AM on April 11

I have a dv6000 and this same thing was happening to me, except it was hovering around 20%. Anyways I never saw it as much of a problem since I didn't really use the battery, however about 2 weeks after it started staying at 20% my computer began to freeze for no reason at all and it would happen at random times. It annoyed me and I thought it was over heating, it turns out that the battery was causing it to freeze and when I took it out and just ran it plugged in it hasn't frozen at all. Anyways not really an answer to your question but if your computer starts to freeze it may be for the same reason.
posted by lilkeith07 at 6:12 AM on April 11

The battery could have memory effect or something in software might have gotten stuck. I'd let the battery run down - boot off a cd or something then let it go. Then charge it completely. Repeat this a couple of times.
posted by Pronoiac at 12:19 PM on April 11