Today I got Toshiba Satellite A105-S2712 for repair with the battery charging problem. It is a new model and we do not have a lot of experience with these laptops. The customer complained that the laptop will not charge the battery when it is plugged into the AC outlet.
The laptop failure symptoms:
The laptop will not turn on when I try to start it from the battery. When the laptop is turned off and plugged into the AC outlet the battery charge LED doesn’t light up. I know that the battery is not charged and the LED should light up when I plug the laptop into the AC outlet. The laptop starts fine when it is plugged. When I move the mouse over the Toshiba Power Icon in the lower right corner, the balloon will pop up and there is a line in there: Battery Remaining: N/A.
The problem repair procedure:
You can easily fix the problem just by updating the BIOS. Toshiba says that the BIOS version should be at least v1.30. So, go to Toshiba website and click on Downloads. Select your laptop model and find any downloads for the BIOS. In the BIOS change history you will see the description of changes.
After I updated the BIOS, the battery charging problem disappeared.
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June 27th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
jakett,
I don’t know why it happened. I always update laptop BIOS using an external USB drive.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
hello, I have a Satellite a105-S4074 with similar charging issues. I went to the website and downloaded the new version. I choose the windows installation method. During the updating process I got a “blue screen of death” for a quick second and then the computer restarts. Do you have any suggestions why this happened?
thank you
June 24th, 2009 at 9:47 am
I have a Toshiba A105-S4324. My battery is permanently stuck at 1% charged. It charged okay a couple days ago but yesterday the battery charge kept decreasing even though the computer was clearly plugged in. And the end result was that it got stuck at 1% and won’t go back up again. Any ideas?
June 15th, 2009 at 8:10 am
Just a quickie for everyone with battery problems.
I own a 2005 Toshiba Equium L20 & a satellite L20,(same models different name)
both battery’s ran out & new one’s purchased along with new chargers, they won’t charge at all, the orange coloured LED flashes constantly,I have had conversations with laptop techies
who are certain it is a hardware problem, apparently a chip or resistor to control the power on the motherboard becomes faulty.
I had a quote of £100 + V.A.T for a “second hand motherboard”
I’m not going to waste my money on repairing a laptop that is only now worth £150.
I’m still looking for the part number so I can replace
it, if anyone has a manual for this / these models please post it
June 11th, 2009 at 1:43 am
Hi,
one more in line with charging problems. I am using a Satellite A200-1CC. Laptop works on a/c only when no battery is installed. If battery is installed there is a 3 second yellowcharging light and that’s it. Battery does not charge at all. I have already bought a new battery-pack. Same problem. That wasn’t it.
New a/c adapter or new mainboard??? Or what else.
Any idea?
June 4th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Like some others above, I have a similar problem with Sat. A215. First, my old and dying battery would respond and then immediately not respond to the AC adapter. In other words, all the power and charge LED would go blue, battery orange (charging) for two or three seconds, then the power LED would mysteriously flash pink. In fact, what it seemed like was that it was underlyingly blue but then flashing orange on top of the blue, creating the illusion of flashing pink.
All that was with a 2 year old battery. So not unexpected for something to be weird. Now I’ve replaced it with a nearly-new Toshiba-brand battery and the problem, while it didn’t start immediately, has come back over the last month I’ve had the new battery.
Several observations:
1. It used to be that the battery would recharge best when the computer was closed and in “sleep”. Then, the flashing would never occur, the battery LED would be orange until it charged and went blue. More recently, though, the flashing pink has occurred even when the computer was in sleep.
2. Now I find that the best charge happens when the computer is in “Hibernate”, though sometimes this fails as well, but it fails differently. Whereas in other settings (power on or sleep) the power LED flashes pink when the problem is going on, in Hibernate, the battery LED flashes orange if it’s not properly charging. (The way I can tell that it isn’t charging is that when I’ve observed the LED to be flashing orange, even after several hours of being plugged in the meter doesn’t read 100% when I revive the computer. If the flashing hasn’t occurred, by that time the battery LED will be blue and the meter will read 100% when I revive the computer.)
3. The problem with the charger seems to happen much much less when the battery is at 100%. That means thta my best strategy is to hibernate the computer if I’ve been using it off battery power, then plug it in so it charges (including unplugging and replugging if the battery LED flashes orange) until the battery is back to 100%, and then using it off the AC after that. Even then, sometimes it doesn’t register the adapter and the pink flashing happens again, but maybe half the time when the battery is full it does register the adapter.
4. I’m about to go home and play with the BIOS (based on purchase date, mine is probably 1.20 or 1.40 instead of 2.00) but I’m not happy to see that a lot of people here haven’t found it to solve their problems. Dad says it’s a reasonable explanation but if other people didn’t find it to work out, then I’ll just have to hope to be lucky.
5. If you have any direct comments or suggestions about my issue, can you please send along a copy of what you post here to klionsky AT brandeis DOT edu ? Thank you.
6. Has anyone ever written Toshiba about this problem?
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Ok,so how do I change the BIOS if I can’t get the machine charged long enough to turn it on?????
May 24th, 2009 at 11:01 am
im running a toshiba satellite A215-S7444 and im having the same problem my battery pack wont charge, i have the have the AC plugged in to turn on and run my pc, down in the left corner the battery icon displays empty and when i hover my mouse over it says (plugged in, not charging), i tried updating the bios, i went to the toshiba site and downloaded and installed the bios for the computer and restared but it did not help… any suggestions?
May 23rd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
I did this – worked for a while. Today it ran down the battery
& crashed my computer … I’ve seen other threads where they
got new cords from Toshiba … I’m beginning to wonder about
the Satellite – I love my little computer, except for this
little eccentricity! ;{
May 22nd, 2009 at 1:09 am
i am also havaing the same problem, but i dont know how to update my bios can any one help me out ?
if any one wants to help me i will be available at vamsi209@gmail.com