The Cat Who Walked on Keyboards

November 29, 2007 10:48 AM

Did my cat fry my laptop battery? Either way, what can I do about it?

Recently my cat walked across the keyboard of my Lenovo laptop, and the laptop immediately shut off. I was able to turn it on again, but now, whenever I unplug the power cord, the laptop shuts down instead of working off of battery. Also, I cannot start the laptop using the battery only.

I checked the battery to ensure it was properly installed. That did not help.

Naturally, the warranty had just expired, so I can't ask the folks at Lenovo, and a search online didn't turn up anything similar. So, of course, I turn to the wisdom of AskMeFi. Thanks in advance.

posted by shallowcenter to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Hm. I wonder if there's some key combination a person or cat can press that tells the machine to not use the battery.
posted by winston at 10:52 AM on November 29, 2007

Response by poster: And so the next Google search begins ...

Thanks for the suggestion, winston -- I'll give it a try.
posted by shallowcenter at 11:20 AM on November 29, 2007

Does your shut off instantly or does it act like you chose to shutdown the computer?

If it shuts off instantly, its probably a hardware issue. Otherwise, it might be some setting that is causing your issue. Try looking in Control Panel -> Power Settings for anything unusual.
posted by burnmp3s at 11:21 AM on November 29, 2007

Response by poster: It shuts off instantly, burn, and when I plug back in and restart, I get the "You quit this application unexpectedly last time ..." everytime I launch an app.
posted by shallowcenter at 11:26 AM on November 29, 2007

In winter time, cats can develop and carry static electricity fields in the tens of thousands of volts, as can human beings. But cats can typically deliver several times the current with their static shocks that people generally do. So, it's possible your cat zapped your system's power management hardware, even though laptops are generally designed as 2 wire devices, depending on insulation to protect the user from lethal shock hazards, rather than a positive electrical grounding system. But it's that lack of grounding that makes them more susceptible to shock damage, than grounded systems, when their insulation breakdown values are finally exceeded.

If that happened, you may have to replace your system board. But before I did that, given the relative costs involved, I'd first try replacing the battery, particularly if you run Vista on standard power management settings, and use the battery a lot. Vista's default power management settings are calling for a lot more power than XP did, particularly if you run the Aero user interface theme. That too, is causing battery life that is, on average, substantially shorter than it was under XP.
posted by paulsc at 11:47 AM on November 29, 2007

From the results that you can see it appears as though your battery is doing nothing at all. Which means that the battery is totally dead or not properly connected.

If you have a multimeter or a friend with one, I'd be curious to see if there's any voltage on the battery at all...
posted by royalchinook at 12:50 PM on November 29, 2007

Your cat probably just jarred or bent some of the plastic and metal around the battery, meaning it's not making a good connection any longer, possibly as simple as just being slightly out of place. Try pulling the battery out and putting it back in, making sure it's well set, and see if that helps.
posted by anaelith at 4:28 PM on November 29, 2007