My laptop’s battery is flat – and I’m at a loss for what to do about it
Battery life is a key aspect of our digital lives. If your device can’t stay on for more than a couple of hours on a charge, the rest of your life will suffer as a result. The Question Why is my laptop not charging? is quite common. So it’s reassuring to know that even this year’s flagship laptops seem stuck with a battery life problem – I just can’t get mine to charge.
I bought my MacBook Air in February this year. And while it’s been an excellent little computer – and comes with some killer hardware – there are a couple of problems I’ve experienced that make the battery life a bit of a worry. The first is that it tends to dim itself at night to save energy. The second is that I can’t always get it to start up when it’s charging.
Why is my laptop not charging?
Now, when I’m plugged into a charger, my MacBook Pro draws as much as 90 watts – that’s more than twice as much as the average portable battery that lasts around eight hours on a charge. As I write this, I’ve run it flat for over an hour and a half, but the battery indicator only says that it’s now charging.
I think it’s starting to charge, but it only displays one digit in the percentage: 7%, so I know it’s coming on any second. If it never does, then I’ll be out of luck for the next few days… which may be a little while, given that I need to get this laptop back to the shop and have my warranty honored.
How much do you care about your laptop? Two days ago, I sent a tech support guy to my house to repair my laptop. A few days earlier, I called the technicians of the company that does my repair. I was treated to a ton of technical mumbo jumbo about a connector or some such that I neither understood nor cared about. And all that time, my laptop was literally going to pieces.
By the time the technician arrived, my laptop was unusable. So I sent him on his merry way, reassured him that I would eventually figure out what the problem was and fix it on my own.
Unfortunately, it took me about a week to crack the mystery. This is a two-part blog post because it explains how I found out the exact reason my computer wasn’t charging, and why you should care.
Part One
For a few days, I had the distinct impression that my MacBook Pro was plugged in all the time. I mean, it always felt charged. I could just never confirm it, and I never noticed any drop-off in my power usage.
Part Two: A couple of attempts to fix it
After I realized that the laptop wasn’t charging, I did a little bit of research to find out if my suspicion was correct. First, I tried plugging my laptop into a lightbulb to see if the computer saw the connection and turned it on because that is always supposed to happen when you plug something into a socket. It did not. I try to explain to you why is my laptop not charging?
Next, I tried plugging the laptop into an outlet with a GFI plug, even though I had originally been told that my charger doesn’t have one. It did not. Finally, I removed my computer from its dock and tried the normal USB-C charging mode, again assuming that it would somehow work. It did not. I was stumped.
But I realized I needed to search for a solution. So I went to my husband. I told him about my troubles with my laptop, and about my suspicion that it had been plugged in all the time. “Don’t plug it in,” he told me. “I just got this charger.”
I asked him if he had just bought a new charger for his MacBook. Nope. “Mine’s all screwed up,” he told me.
“What do you mean, it’s all screwed up?”
“The USB-C adapter we bought is super old and doesn’t work anymore. It wouldn’t charge my Computer at all. So I only bought this recently develop charger.”
“That explains it,” I told him. “It’s plugged into the wrong slot.”
“What slot is that?”
“The GFI plug.”
He pointed to the outlet, and sure enough, it was plugged into the GFI port. That explained why it wasn’t charging my MacBook Pro.
He didn’t have to say anything else, because, at that moment, I started screaming “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!” and running around in circles waving my hands in the air.
P.S. I finally got around to fixing the problem, and my laptop is working fine now. But if you are having problems with your computer and don’t know what’s wrong, you can check out this list of some common problems here. It’s just like the laptop tech support guy told me to do.
Hope You know the answer Now: why is my laptop not charging?
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