Acer Aspire notebook stopped running off the mains, and will only run off the battery
I have an Acer Aspire 1670 that’s about a year and a half old. Basically what happens is that the machine stopped running off the mains, and will only run off the battery. The only way to charge the battery again is to turn the computer off, and then it will charge again. That began happening about 2 weeks ago. Then a few days ago the charging when turned off became really tempremental, and then it just stopped.
The power adapter says that power is getting from the mains to the adapter, but then the battery still won’t charge. Does anyone know what the problem could be?
I think it could be a bad DC jack. I do not work with Acer notebooks, so it would be only my guess. Try to plug in the AC adapter and wiggle the plug inside the jack. Can you make LEDs to flicker by wiggling the jack? Try to press on the power button while you are wiggling the power jack. If you notice that you can start the laptop when you apply some pressure on the power plug (and power jack), then most likely you have a power jack issue.
The problem you’ve described is very similar to a Toshiba Satellite A70 and A75 power jack problem. A crack occurs between the positive connector on the jack and the system board. As a result, the laptop battery charges only intermittently or doesn’t charge at all, the laptop will not run on AC power or the laptop will not turn on at all. Usually you can solve this problem by re-soldering or replacing the power jack on the system board.
I’m not sure if the power jack is a part of the system board on Acer Aspire 1670 laptop, so remember it’s just a guess.
I would also test the AC adapter itself. May be the adapter is bad even though an LED lights up.
Try to remove the battery and run the laptop just on AC power. Does it make any difference? Can you turn it on?
January 11th, 2007 at 11:27 am
I had the same problem. I just removed acer drivers, now the power supply is handled by XP, and when I plug the ac while on the computer with my battery at 20%, tadaaa it’s charging.
But there’s one problem, acer drivers handled cpu speed, and since I have a core duo cpu, the second core now runs, and i can’t just set this through XP.
January 10th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Hi
I have a fix for my Acer now : )
Further to my comments yesterday about the problem not being linked to XP, I decided to try loading XP Home OEM on NTFS (not FAT32), with basic Acer drivers but not the Acer launch manager and ran the laptop battery down to 80%, then plugged the power supply in, the laptop battery then successfully started recharging.
The only issue I encountered was havng to phone Microsoft to re-register the serial number.
Hope this helps if you have had the same problem.
Regards,
Roger
P.S. a friend with a Dell lent me a copy of Windows OEM
January 10th, 2007 at 4:26 am
I also have an Acer 1670 and I too have the exact same problem. I’ve contacted Acer, at first they recommended I try a full system recovery, suggesting it could be a driver issue. This provided no effect. Now they’ve recommended I send the laptop in for repairs.
I should point out I bought the laptop in Decemember 2004, the problem occured around 8 months later, and I hadn’t used the laptop since then untill one week ago, so its a very very old problem.
January 9th, 2007 at 11:29 am
hi all
I have a Acer 1670 and a problem as mentioned above.
If the battery is charged it will run on the AC power supply however, if the battery loses charge it will continue to discharge even if the AC power is plugged in.
I have flashed the BIOS to ver 1.12 also I have noticed that if I remove the battery the laptop runs ok on the mains, also while checking out the BIOS with the battery in and the AC power cable in, the machine stopped due to lack of power so this may discount a XP problem (on my laptop) does anyone have any ideas ???
P.S. I have also tried a power supply from a Packard Bell which gave the same results as the Acer power supply
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Hey Jason,
There is no way for me to guess what is causing the hissing noise on your board. Sorry man, I don’t work with motherboards on the component level. If the motherboard is bad, I replace it with another one but never repair.
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Gerard,
Here’s an update regarding the comment 21. I don’t have a Windows XP machine in front of me right now (I’m running Vista), but in my device manager there are two different entries for the battery too. One says: Microsoft AC Adapter and the second says: Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery. I assume it’s normal to have two different entries in there (never paid attention before). As I mentioned before, check if there is a newer BIOS for your laptop.
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Gerard,
I don’t work with Acer laptops and cannot say exactly what is wrong but here are some guesses.
Enter the laptop setup and find out what version of the BIOS is installed on your computer. Make sure you have the latest one. It’s possible that one of the latest revisions fixes this problem.
Does it happen only with the external DVD drive or the laptop also shuts down when you run intensive applications (like video editing)? It could be a heat related issue. Make sure the heatsink is not clogged with dust. Find an air compressor or buy a can of compressed air and blow off the cooling module. Test the laptop again and see if the problem is gone.
Check out notebook hardware control utility. It’s free and might be helpful for you.
January 2nd, 2007 at 7:32 am
I have an Acer Aspire 1640 and am experiencing a very similar problem.
For a few weeks when powering my laptop i have had to wiggle the wire around to find the right position for it to charge continuously. Then eventually it became impossible for me to find a position that it would charge. The best that could be found is a position that it would charge intermediately. But it would charge for a second then the screen would flash (the acer ePower settings which means that brightness is lower on battery power) and would then flash on for another second and so on. This wasn’t good enough to keep the battery running. And now eventually my power has completely ran out and it doesn’t seem to charge when off either so i can’t turn it on at all.
I have found no solution and this laptop is sitting there useless. I’m pretty sure it’s not the cable as i have tried the cable in an identical laptop and it works fine in that. So it must be my laptop. I have read around the internet so many accounts of this and similar.
Acer need to sort this out, it seems to be happening to a lot of people, but no solid solution annoyingly.
December 31st, 2006 at 2:31 pm
Thanks you for the replys.. i have the power cord in now without the battery this is what happens:
Power on:
Freezes for about 5 seconds like it would if it had crashed, then it begins to boot.. im running it now with just the power cable in it to reply to this.
I just want to figure out the hissing noise aswell because it never used to do that.
Thank you for your replys much appriciated.
December 31st, 2006 at 11:30 am
small update:
I’ve found a blog that discusses energy consumption, that gave me some pointers to software discussed in my earlier post.
For those interested: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/index.php?cat=71
Now the update:
I noticed that in my Device Manager I ‘suddenly’ (don’t know how long, as I didn’t expand the folder tree earlier and both are working) found TWO device drivers for my ONE laptop battery:
One ACPI compliant adapter (might be named slightly different, as I have a Dutch language XP Pro) and one Microsoft AC adapter.
The latter was never installed by me manually, but if I remove it and search for new devices it pops up again.
Both are installed and running properly, but when checking different combinations, I found that the Microsoft AC adapter ALWAYS says ‘AC power’, EVEN if I remove the AC jack.
I disabled the Microsoft AC adapter and am running on the ACPI compliant adapter. The tray icon is now a battery, but remains stable at 100% (equals AC power, but without the correct icon).
Haven’t tested the durability with this situation, but I’m enclined to believe that the TWO adapters played a trick on me.
The Microsoft adapter was the reason I kept my ‘AC power’ icon in the system tray, leading me to believe I was indeed on AC power, where the battery was actually running down.
I’ll try a DVD later on and let you know, for those interested, how it holds up.
Acer batteries are known for their short runtime, and it may just have been that 45 minuted lifetime of the battery on DC power was the point during the movie (halftime) where it just ran out of juice and shut down. No meessages as it was ALSO running on Microsoft’s AC power adapter.
Techs, am I talking a lot of rubbish, or could this be the issue ?
Again, your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Gerard.
December 31st, 2006 at 8:09 am
Dear all,
This seems to be a real Acer problem.
I’ve been fiddling with my Aspire 1670WLMi, about 1.5 years old as well, since it’s been experiencing the exact same problem as the original writer.
If the battery is charged and connected to AC power it will run ‘forever’. When I, however, disconnect from AC my system tray icon for the battery status comes up and starts counting down (normal behavior). If I re-connect to AC power, it doesn’t respond to that and remains sucking up battery power. Until that’s dead, too.
The only thing to do then is power down completely and wait until the battery is recharged. If the battery is full, and the laptop is connected to AC power is will again run ‘forever’. As long as it’s not disconnected for AC power.
Making my laptop effectively a desktop PC. It only runs on AC power and has to be connected ALL the time to AC power.
I’ve already bought a replacement charger, but with all the same symptoms.
I thought it could by the battery itself and was about to purchase a new one, but as it turns out in all the stories above, that will have no effect either.
One other issue that’s probably related, is that DVD’s that are played from an external DVD-player (USB2) will cause the machine about half-way the movie to die on me.
It doesn’t stall, doesn’t hang, no error messages, no BSOD, just dead. As if the battery has dropped to 0% instantly.
I’m a programmer and have intermediate experience with computers (bought my first Commodore 64 in 1984) but before I replace every part in this laptop (or throw it out the window …) I’d like to hear a tech’s opinion.
Could it be an overheating issue ? Or a power drain issue ? (PC runs at 2.8GHz, normal cooling, not overclocked).
Does anyone know of runtime monitoring software for battery life and system status (sort of like SiSoft’s Sandra, but for temperature, Voltage and stuff like that, my BIOS helps me no further).
Appreciate any reply as this issue is bugging me big time (I’ve already passed the point of EVER buying or recommending an Acer again).
Regards,
Gerard
December 29th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
John,
What if you remove the laptop battery and start the laptop from the AC adapter (without battery installed). Will it start at all?
December 29th, 2006 at 7:33 am
Hi
I have a toshiba satellite m50 and lately it will not run off AC power. When above around 90% charged it will run off AC power but anything below it will not charge or run of AC power. When i turn it off it will charge normally.
Does anyone know the problem?
thanks
December 24th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
Thanks very much for your reply, i know alot about computers i have been building them for a long time. However laptops ive never really taken apart. I have had all of the laptop apart down to its bear bones and have not seen anything noticeable, like i said i thought it was a CPU hissing but i changed it and it never made a difference. You think you could shed some light on:
1) What is making the hissing noise? it makes the noise when i have the power cord plugged it makes a high and low pitched noise. Kinda like when a hdd seeks to find somthing it makes the noise loud when u open somthing and does not make it very much when you are doing nothing.
December 23rd, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Jason,
There is no way that I can troubleshoot a laptop with liquid spill over the internet. It’s necessary to take it apart and found all parts damaged by the liquid. According your description I can assume that the juice went down to the system board and probably damaged it. Not sure, it’s necessary to open it up for more accurate diagnosis.
December 22nd, 2006 at 8:43 am
Hi i was woundering if you guys could help me. Ive been trying to find a solution to my laptop problem. Watered down orange juce was spilt on my laptop about a year ago and i had to replace the inverter to get the backlight working again. However, since then when i have the power cord pluged in the back and try to turn on my laptop the inverter lights light up but nothing happens. Then when i pull out the power cord it will boot up. If i plug the power back in it will work for about 15minutes before giving me a black screen and crashing. I then need to remove the power cable and the battery before the system fully powers down and then i can boot it up again.
When running the laptop on just the battery it works fine unless i put alot of stress on the computer such as running a game it will also crash. Other than that it can run on the batter for basic internet browsing for hours untill the battery has ran out. The laptop near the power cord also makes a hissing noise when i have the power plugged in to it.
Laptop model is an MEDION MD95454 WIM2070, have you any idears what could be wrong for what i cud replace to try fix this? i have tried putting a new cpu in but that makes no difference.
Thanks in advance as i have been trying to sort this for over a year now.
Thanks You very much
i also have a laptop wim2030 with faulty gfx the screen is all garbaged and pixely. am sure the gfx has over heated and died out is there anyways i can fix either of these with eachothers parts?
thanks.
December 19th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
Brice,
I’m not really sure what’s going on with your laptop, never seen a problem like this before. I would guess that you might have a faulty AC adapter. Not sure. I would find a test adapter and see if it makes any difference. Find a multimeter and test voltage on the AC adapter, make that the adapter outputs correct voltage.
December 19th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
Benjamin Bem,
Will it actually shut down (of hibernate) if you continue running the laptop on the battery power? If the laptop still runs fine after you unplug the power even though there is an X mark, then it could be a software issue. If the laptop actually shuts down (hibernates) then it’s a hardware issue.
I’m not familiar with Acer laptops but here’s what I think. Usually the AC adapter and battery plugs directly into the system board and if you replaced both parts, then there must be something wrong with the motherboard itself. I would try re-flashing/upgrading the BIOS. It’s possible that the BIOS got corrupted and it causes the problem. Make sure that the laptop is connected to the main power when you reflash/upgrade the BIOS. Read user’s manual. If upgrading the BIOS will not help, then I would assume that you have a bad motherboard.
December 18th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
Hi I have an ASUS A2500D which is 2 years old.
It runs fine from battery power but whenever it is plugged to the AC charger, the fans start to spin really fast and the computer turns off in less than 10 seconds. When the battery is removed and the computer plugged in : same story. The only way i can use it is to charge the battery while leaving the computer off, unplugging it and run it solely from battery power. Any clues about how to fix this?
December 17th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
I got an acer aspire 3003LCI. Suddenly, the battery won’t charge! Shows charging up to 8% but never beyond. Once I remove the AC adapter, an X marks the battery, saying I’ll lose my work. Thought it was the adapter, changed it, nothing improved. I just changed the battery but the problem persists. what else can I do?
December 6th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
I have the same problem. Now my laptop is a Acer Aspire 3002lci and it is totally dead. I remember it running when I still have power in my battery. Once my battery is drained, the laptop is paper weight. I’ve been thinking that it’s the power adapter so I bought a new one but it did me no good. I just found this website and am beginning to believe it’s the power jack.
My question then would be what kind of power jack do I purchase as I have no idea how to find the model or size or whatever. Help?
December 5th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
hi there. I have a FSC V7010 with a similar problem. About a month ago,seemingly just after I had attached many USB peripherals,my laptop suddenly stopped running off power,and would only charge the battery.I thought it might be the power supply so I bought another with correct voltage etc. This worked for about a month, then I had to move the cable for it to charge.
Stupidly, I ignored this growing problem and last week the replacement power supply stopped working. The plastic inside the adapter has melted around the pin of the power connector, fusing it to the laptop.
I acquired a port replicator, and my original power supply is now kind of working with that. As I am writing this, the power has died, I unplug the power supply and leave it for 15 minutes, plug it back in, working for 20 mins. I am wondering whether replacement of the unusable mainboard power socket is worth it…
help me please any advice
thank you
December 3rd, 2006 at 1:10 am
Dave,
The laptop turns off or it goes into hibernation mode? Enter the power management software in the control panel and check settings. May be somebody changed power settings and now the laptop hibernates if it’s unused for some time.
December 2nd, 2006 at 4:22 pm
help please i have a acer aspire5002wimi.
just lately it has been turn off wihle it is plugged into the main . it only happens when i stop using or when i need to go out for a minite or too., it starts up fine . i do leave the laptop on most of the time.
December 1st, 2006 at 4:13 am
I have had the same thing happen with an Acer Aspire 1670. The power supply would charge the battery but dot power the computer. I couldn’t find anything wrong with the power connector (though it is almost impossible tp get at). I measured the voltage out of the power supply as I switched on the computer. With no load (the computer off) the voltage was 19 V but as the hard disk spun up the voltage dropped to 0 V or so and the computer went off. I replaced the power supply and everything works properly.
November 26th, 2006 at 5:49 am
Hiya! Wonder if u can help, I have a compaq armada M700 and it’s gettin on a bit. For some reason I have the opposite problem to the guy with the Acer Aspire. It will run off the mains fine but when i try and turn it on with the battery, absolutely nothing happens. Thing is once or twice it has, n has had quite a good charge on the battery but 95% of the time it just won’t turn on. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
Chris Tann
November 20th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
David,
If you have no soldering experience I would take the laptop to a repair shop.
Before you take it for a repair, test the AC adapter itself. The adapter power cord works under a lot of stress. If you plug/unplug the adapter a lot, the wire inside the cord (close to the power plug) might get damaged. If the wire inside the cord is damaged, it would explain why you have to wiggle the plug to power up the laptop.
Test the power cord, may be it’s something simple.
November 20th, 2006 at 2:02 am
I have an acer travelmate, and about 2 weeks ago I noticed that it would not charge when the laptop was turned on, and when I shut down, the ac light would then come on.
Now, the ac light will only come on when I wiggle the connection, and only when the machine is off – it sounds like the exact same problem to me!!
Does anyone know how easy it is to fix this yourself (soldering??), or is it best to take this to a repaor shop?
November 9th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
My Laptop’s AC Power light blinks on and off when ever I have the AC Adapter plugged into the PC and it is on… When the Laptop is off I can plug in the AC Adapter and it will charge the battery just fine. It only blinks between AC Power and Battery Power when the laptop is turned on.
November 7th, 2006 at 9:24 am
I HAVE TASHIBA SATELLITE PRO IT APPEARS TO BE DEAD. BECAUSE IT WONT START UP BUT THE GREEN LIGHT IS ON FOR POWER. BUT THE BATTIRE LIGHT BLINKS AND IT SOULD NOT BLINK WHEN I PRESS THE POWER BUTTON TO START THE LAP TOP. THE POWER LIGHT GO OUT AND COME BACK ON AND THAT IS IT. NOTHING ELSE HAPPENS SOUND OR FAN NOTHING HELP