The Battery will not charge..

[Casino795]

This is the second battery provided by ACER. The initial battery would not keep a charge and the battery ACER replaced for me, just several months ago, will NOT take a charge. I tried to charge it for 16 hours and still, nothing. I called ACER tech support but they would not help me as the unit is beyond warranty they said (purchased March of 2009), so the atomated msystem kicked me out. I have sent their tech support folks two email messages, on their website form over the past 17 days regarding the issue but I have never had a reply. Any suggestions? Thanks. Dave

 

[hubba_dubba]

Have the same issues with my AOA150. A quick google and it seems that a bios flash to latest version may help. it has something to do with earlier bios's not being able to charge 6 cell batteries from flat, not sure if that is true.
My issues is that i can't get mine to flash to test it out.

 

[SuperNerd]

Similar problems here. To cut a long story short, my AOA150 sat unused and unplugged for about nine months. Now, it starts up and runs fine on AC but the battery will not charge. I've got the most current BIOS but when I boot into DOS and try to apply it I get a priviledged instruction error and the flash doesn't go anywhere.

If I had XP on it, I could flash from inside Windows - is there a flash utility for Linplus? I don't want to go through the XP install process until I know I can actually use the machine on battery.

(Edit: I meant Linplus, not Linspire)

 

[SuperNerd]

Okay. Managed to flash it up to 3309 (used UNetbootin instead of the HP boot utility, that appears to be the trick). And ... it appears to be charging. Time will tell (3 cell battery, I left that out of the previous post).

Next issue is I apparently broke the trackpad ribbon cable - that's an issue for another thread when I get around to dealing with it.

Woo-Hoo!

 

[duhmel]

I did the BIOS update 3310 using the info on the ACER website. Very simple to do (took less than a minute) but I almost turned blue holding my breath while the update was going on. You just load two file onto a USB drive - hold down the Fn and esc key while you turn the unit on ... and pray!!!! What was wierd was that the download of the 3310 BIOS contained a bunch of files but the instructions only identified two file to be loaded onto the USB drive, and for one of those files you had to rename it. It seemed a bit squirrely but once I did the update the battery started charging again.

 

[CZroe]

My 3-cell's capacity rapidly decreased over three months until it would no longer charge (0%, red X in the Window XP dialog, plugged in but not charging icon/indicator in system tray, etc). Basically, when I noticed the problem I was getting less than an hour of battery life. I lost over 60% capacity over the next three months until it would immediately say that it was critical after wired power was removed. My new 9-cell battery seems fine but my 3-cell still isn't working even w/3010.

It was likely caused by a short in the power adapter (sometimes had to wiggle it around to get it to work).