my extensa 5630 only charges when shut down. is it a power circuit or adaptor problem?

namnicioidee

hello!

since yesterday i've had this peculiar problem. when on and plugged in, it would say "plugged in, not charging" and constantly switch to "plugged in, charging"(rarely) or "not plugged in". this constant changing would take place every few seconds and the beep-ing would drive me mad(if sound is on).
also, the battery discharges as if it was running only on battery power.

 

if i remove the charger, the computer runs without any problems on battery power alone.

if i shut it down and plug in the charger, it would charge the battery normally.

if i remove the battery and attempt to boot on adaptor power alone, it would start but only run for 1-2-3 seconds than shut down.

 

this is obviously not a battery issue since on battery alone it runs flawlessly. on various other troubleshooting sites i've found that it might be a issue with "microsoft acpi compliant control method battery" however i tried uninstalling, updating drivers and a few other unlikely methods to no avail.

 

my best guess is that either the adaptor cable or adaptor itself got damaged somehow and it's not providing enough power to run the laptop (however enough to charge the battery when system is shut down). i have no way of testing it though.. the only solution is to buy a new adaptor and hope this was the problem indeed.

my second best guess is that the laptop's inner power circuit got messed up (this would be rather sad as depending on the damage repairs could cost me as much as the laptop itself ... ). is there any way i can test if this is the case? any diagnostics program or somesuch?

 

any other ideas or feedback are welcome. cheers!

 

linvik

Hi

 

I think both your guesses are very much spot on, these two guesses should be one of the root causes.

Unfortunately I have no good way to give you a hint of telling which is causing the issue, but it's more likely (as you say) that it's the adapter rather than the pin connector in the computer.

The way you can tell that these 2 guesses are correct is that the computer doesnt run smooth on soley ac adapter, and that's also what makes me beleive that it's probably the adapter that's failing. For sure there is some kind of glitch.

I would probably go to a store and ask if you could try a universal adapter that they sell, with the argument that if it's solves my glitch issue, ill buy it. that way you wont buy anything that wont solve the problem.

I dont know the age of your pc and tbh I dont even know the model extensa, but wear and tear on ac adapters is common as they're with us all the time basically..

Hope this helps

JC_1234

It sounds to me like the adapter is bad. Extensas are a unit that Acer made a couple years ago I believe, but I don't think that they produce them any longer. I went to the us-store.acer.com and found the AC Adapter that you could purchase from them here, http://store.acer.com/store/acerna/en_US/pd/productID.256679100, looks like it runs $29.99 + tax and shipping if that's a cheaper route.

namnicioidee

indeed, the laptop is running it's third year i think(or fourth maybe.. don't really remember when i purchased it) but with a few upgrades(including a ssd) it has served me well and i have reason to hope it will do so for a while longer.

 

to be honest i don't know why this happened now as it has not received any new "challenges" lately and i haven't moved it from it's spot on the desk in over a week.

the only change i can think of is that i set it to performance mode instead of standard mode in the power options because i wanted to play a little. and while that happened a few days back, it's effect might not have been immediate. although the laptop itself didn't get any hotter and i thought i have no reason to worry, it might indeed have been too high a toll to place on the adaptor. i will purchase a new one and hope that solves it.  

thank you for your feedback!