Hardware Windows 7 'No battery is detected'

[Lucifer666]

My mom's got an Acer Aspire 8920g

The battery was dead and wouldn't hold a charge at all, it was tethered to the charger basically and yanking it out would instantly kill the laptop

I bought a compatible replacement battery off ebay

The laptop works without having to be in the charger rn. BUT in Windows 7 the notification bar shows an empty battery icon with a red 'x' and a power cord. Hovering over it shows 'No battery is detected', even when it's not in the charger

Basically the battery functions as normal only the OS doesn't recognise it. So I can never tell how much %age is left, and it just spontaneously dies when it's empty.

So far what I've tried is updating the BIOS, uninstalling the driver under Device Manager so that Windows would re-install it, and I've tried taking out the battery and unplugging it then holding the power button for 20 seconds then putting the battery back in and booting it. No dice.

Any ideas?

 

[Originality]

Just an "idea", but maybe this "compatible replacement" doesn't have a charge detector in the unit? Or maybe something in the wiring is off, that Windows can't read off it?

Or it could be that Windows (or the laptop itself) needs to recalibrate the battery. I have no idea how to do that, however.

 

[blindseer]

Go into the bios and calibrate the battery?

 

[FAST6191]

Was this replacement battery from China/Hong Kong? If so then the same policy most apply to flash memory from such a location also applies to batteries.

As Originality said it is probably not one with charge reporting or similar. There is not a lot you can do, I have not played much with acer batteries/chargers but I not recall any great issues when compared to the likes of Dell and HP.

What I am more here to say is you can actually fix laptop batteries with relative ease, the following is for tools but it is exactly the same for laptop batteries (though I should say some tools and some laptops do actually have an EEPROM that stores how many times it has been charged and acts accordingly).