Recently I had an issue with my work laptop (an HP ProBook 440 G3 running on Windows 7). It showed that it was plugged in and the battery was flat dead at 0% and it wasn’t charging.
At first, I thought it was the chargers fault so I went and borrowed a few other colleagues chargers as well to test it out. It didn’t work. The battery was still flat and my laptop couldn’t get it to start charging.
I turned to Google.
Came back with a plethora of solutions from taking out the battery, removing the static charge and then inserting the battery back in again. Nope, that didn’t work. I couldn’t do any of the software fixes such as uninstalling some drivers related to the battery or updating them as I didn’t have administrator privileges hence I could only work with “hardware” fixes.
Finally, I decided to try out a mixture of solutions. Basically, the root cause wasn’t hardware. Yes, the charger worked fine and yes, the battery worked fine. How did I know that? Simple, I swapped batteries with my colleague and voila. The dead battery was being charged up.
So the best solution is to get the battery charged up elsewhere before putting it back in. I know it’s a tall order for people who don’t have the convenience of colleagues and friends who have the exact same make and model but try getting some support from your local shop.
It’s way better than just going out to buy a new battery as some of the people who faced this issue online did.
