Predator Helios 300 PH315-53 only turns on after a power drain, what could be causing this issue?

Hi, my Acer Predator Helios 300 has issues turning on. I'll plug the charger in and it will show a full battery but nothing happens when I press the power button, no screen, fans, whirring, it's dead. I will disconnect all external drives and the charger, then hold the power button for about 1 minute to discharge the battery. Sometimes I have just waited for 15-30 minutes after discharging the battery and it has then worked, sometimes not. In that case I have removed the battery and plugged the charger back in but the laptop will still not turn on. I have then removed the charger, held the power button again for 1 minute to discharge any static and reinstalled the battery. The laptop has then turned on after this.

Are these signs that the battery is starting to fail or could something else be going on that's causing a build up of static and preventing the laptop from powering on?

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JackE

Are these signs that the battery is starting to fail

Very likely. Try this.

(1) Go to the elevated command prompt. Enter 'powercfg /batteryreport'.

(2) Then return to the desktop. Open file explorer.

(3) Then search for' battery-report.html' in the C\windows\system32\ sub-folder. Double-click to open it in the browser.

(4) Compare design full charge capacity with its remaining full charge capacity.

(5) Post screenshot of the first part of the report if possible.

KahGash

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1241494#Comment_1241494

Thank you for your response. I've attached 2 screenshots of the battery report and the full charge vs remaining full charge. Hopefully you can shed some light on the numbers and if they're good or bad.

Many thanks,

JackE

Battery sensor suggests its capacity has been unstable since at least the end of Oct. Anything unusual happen between Oct 29 & Nov 5? Did this happen suddenly for no apparent reason?

KahGash

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1241628#Comment_1241628

No, nothing unusual or out of the ordinary from what I can remember. Just suddenly and without reason or warning

JackE

Open Device Manager. If no red or yellow warnings, uninstall all the drivers you find in the batteries folder. Exit Device Manager without reinstalling anything.

Then shut down Windows normally. Turn machine back on. Windows should auto re-detect the battery, its sensor and auto re-install fresh copies of the battery drivers.

KahGash

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1241636#Comment_1241636

I've now done this. I'll keep an eye out over the next few days to see if the problem still occurs.

JackE

OK. Please let us know results either way. Thanks.

KahGash

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1241787#Comment_1241787

Issue seems to be coming back slowly. A couple of days ago it would take a few presses of the power button to turn on, then had to hold the power button for a minute to drain any static. Just gone to turn it on today and it wouldn't. Ended up removing battery again, completing a drain and having to wait around 15 minutes before it turned on finally.

JackE

Ended up removing battery again, completing a drain and having to wait around 15 minutes before it turned on finally.

What do you mean by "power drain"? Pressing & holding power button for 5-10 seconds should turn laptop off if it had been previously set to sleep mode instead of shut down mode.

KahGash

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1242154#Comment_1242154

When looking into the issue initially, I came across information regarding a build up of static that would prevent the laptop from turning on and by holding down the power button for 30 seconds to a minute, this would get rid of the static build up. Not sure how true or correct this is but thought it worth a try and generally seems to have worked.

I never set the laptop to sleep mode, only ever shut down when I have finished using it. Tonight when it wouldn't start, I plugged the charger in and the LED indicated that the battery was at full charge, I had shut the laptop down in the morning.

JackE

I never set the laptop to sleep mode

I used to say that too. Except sometimes I apparently clicked the sleep button by mistake, especially when using touchpad. Wouldn't turn on next day. Then I noticed the laptop would sometimes turn on if I hit the spacebar and maybe a random key. Aha! 🙂

If possible, please post another screenshot of the latest battery report just to see if it's lost even more of its capacity since Nov 15th.

KahGash

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1242158#Comment_1242158

I've included the recent battery usage as I've been using it for around an hour now without charging and it's dropped from 93% down to about 50% in an hour. All I've had open is Google.

I also breifly shut the laptop down about 10 minutes ago so I could open it up and look at the battery model/specs. The laptop turned on first time after so it's going to sound strange but maybe it doesn't like a cold start?

JackE

I've included the recent battery usage as I've been using it for around
an hour now without charging and it's dropped from 93% down to about 50%
in an hour. All I've had open is Google.

Not unusual if you're using Chrome or Edge energy hogs. Something still seems to have upset the charge sensors on Nov 9th or 10th. A 20-25% capacity gain & loss like this within a few days is abnormal. Do you recall if perhaps the power-up failures started on the 9th or 10th?

KahGash

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1242305#Comment_1242305

Ah yes I was using Chrome, didn't realise how energy hungry it was. I can't find an exact date the issue started happening but I've narrowed it down to between the 2nd - 5th November.

KahGash

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1242337#Comment_1242337

Just looking into those dates further for anything noticable. The only thing that stands out is that I started a Youtube channel recently (first upload being on the 31st October), but between the 31st October and the 4th November, I had a particularly intense recording, editing and upload period in which the laptop was on the majority (if not all) of the time and working hard. However, I'm unsure if this could have caused any issues or something internally to fail.

JackE

Battery report only detected an anomaly happened Nov 9th or 10th.

If System Protection was turned on in Control Panel's restore point app, you might want to check for automatic restore points with date stamps between 10/31 & 11/05 that might've been created by errant updates

KahGash

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1242377#Comment_1242377

No automatic restore points between those dates from what I can see, the furthest back it goes is 11/11 when there was just a Windows update.

JackE

Issue seems to be coming back slowly.

Unfortunate that the restore point cache was too small. Some WinUpdates will fill the default size allocation & erase earlier points. Since this seems to be an intermittent issue, you might want to configure max cache.

Then uninstall all the battery drivers again if you haven't done so already. You shouldn't have to keep disconnecting the battery to reset or power drain this model unless something's wrong with the battery charge sensor —- which might in fact still be the root cause.

KahGash

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1242586#Comment_1242586

Ah yeah, the cache was only set to 2%, I've upped this to 25%.

I've now uninstalled the battery drivers and restarted again. Could it be worth just investing in a new battery and seeing if the issue persists?

JackE

Could it be worth just investing in a new battery and seeing if the issue persists?

Well, I suppose if Amazon had an early BlkFri special today, I might be tempted too. But then I'd have to figger what else I could use for $6 to make the order hit the magic $35 for free shipping. 🙂

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