BleepingComputer.com: Toshiba Shuts Down w/ Battery Power

Hi, I'm not sure if this is the best section to post this but here it is:

I have a Toshiba Satellite 105A laptop that's about 5 or 6 years old. I purchased a new battery for it a couple of years ago and it worked OK for the first few months and then it started to hold a charge for less and less time until it would not hold a charge at all. I purchased another battery for it and the same thing happened only more quickly. Every indication shows that it is charging and after charging the meter shows 100%. I conditioned the batteries when they were new the way the manufacturer recommended by cycling them completely from fully charged to fully discharged. Sometimes when I unplug it, it will run on battery power for a few minutes before shutting down and other times it will shut down immediately. I seems like it will shut down immediately when I pick it up and move the laptop, but not always.

The fan sounds perfect. The fan vents are not obstructed. I have cleaned the contacts of the laptop and the batteries.

I have resorted to using it only with AC power. Everything works fine under AC power.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

If you have access to a voltmeter I would start by testing the DC voltages coming off of the contacts that connect with the battery. You can do this by plugging in the laptop without a battery, and use one of the screws on the back of the laptop as the ground for the (black) end of the voltmeter. Use the hot (red) end of the voltmeter and touch it to each of the contacts (the ones that would make contact with the battery), one by one, on the back of the laptop. Record each of the voltages coming from the contacts. They should roughly add up to the voltage listed on the back of the battery. This will let us know if the voltages going into the battery are correct.

Lets try that first as a basic test.

Thanks Suicide King,

Before I give my results I wanted to point out what I read on the Toshiba website about my laptop:

"In very rare cases, the battery pack of your PC may stop accepting a charge, i.e., the battery stops working and no longer supplies power to the computer. To minimize the risk of ever experiencing this problem, we strongly recommend that you download and install the latest BIOS by clicking the 'Downloads' link that will appear when you are finished reading Support News."
I attempted to update my Bios but was unable to so far. I keep getting errors. Still trying though.

OK, here are the results of my voltmeter test. First, there are 7 total and 2 types of contacts on the laptop that connect to the battery. I'm assuming the far left and far right are ground but I could be wrong. They are slightly larger (longer and wider) than the contacts between them. Between # 6 and 7 (the last one) there is a little plastic spacer pin. Using a screw on the back as ground, I came up with the following readings:

Note: Voltmeter is set to DC mV

#1 (larger) -.7
#2 3.342
#3 3.342
#4 4.59
#5 -.6
#6 This one varies from 52-4. The longer I hold it on the contact, the lower it got. It took about 1 minute to go from 52 to 4. It sort of jumped all over the place but slowly got lower.
#7 (Larger) Started at 27.6 and climbed by .1 over about a minute to 28.8 and was still climbing after the one minute mark.

The battery has the following printed on it:Li-ion 10.8 4400mAh

Again, Thanks and any advice is appreciated.

5+ years old is quite the feat these days for a laptop, shelf life is about 3 years. As for battery issues, the companies making these made them as a throw away item, with about 1 year shelf life. If you get 2 years out of a laptop batter today you are in great shape. I am on my third battery in 5 years for my dell (will be the last dell i buy) And this one is also at minimum life, even with a once a week unplug and let die. Sadly there is nothing you can do except buy another battery or upgrade to a newer system.

Thanks, but I don't think it's the battery. The new one started having problems after the first couple of weeks.

Update. I have successfully updated my BIOS and now everything seems to be working better than ever. I just got almost 4 hours of battery time from a battery that has never given me more than 2 1/2 hrs. I re-tested the contacts with my voltmeter. Some readings were the same but some were much different than from pre BIOS update. It was no doubt the problem. I'm now going to try the old battery that I thought was dead. Good thing I kept it.

Cheers

This post has been edited by Gregavi: 06 April 2011 - 11:48 PM