Most people who have have owned a laptop for a while have encountered this problem. Your battery is dead or dying, you plug your laptop in, and you realize that your laptop won’t charge. There are a couple of reasons why this might be happening, but finding the right solution will require some troubleshooting on your part to narrow down the exact problem. Here are some steps that you can take to find out why your laptop won’t charge, and what you may need to replace or repair to get it working again.

Starting With the Obvious

The first thing that you should do when your laptop won’t charge is just make sure that it isn’t some temporary glitch, a problem with an unplugged cable or the battery becoming dislodged. It might sound simply silly, but it’s very easy for a power cable to be accidentally kicked our from the wall plug, or the connection to not be fully complete at the laptop end. Here is a step by step list of how to check the most obvious things that could be causing the problem when a laptop won’t charge.

1. Restart the computer and see if that solves the problem. You’d be surprised just how often this can fix what would otherwise be a major problem.
2. Turn off the computer and unplug your AC adapter, both from the computer and from the converter (the rectangular box in the middle of your power cord), and then remove the battery from the device.
3. Hold down your power button for at least 30 seconds. This is called doing a “power cycle” and it may help to solve the problem.
4. Hook everything back up and make sure that there is no dust keeping the battery from connecting and that the AC adapter is tight. Turn your computer back on and see if this solves the problem.

Check Your Power Cord

If you do happen to need a new power cord, you may not have to replace all of it, and sometimes partial or even full power cords are easy to find secondhand, so you may not even have to pay full price for it. To test this, you are going to have to find someone that has a laptop and borrow the section of their cord that has the wall plug on it. Simply plug their cord into your transformer (the black brick between your computer and the wall plug) and see if your computer charges. If not, it is the other part of the power cord. If it does charge, then you know it is only the half that goes to the wall that you need to replace.

A Problem With Drivers

Finally, your laptop might not be charging because of a problem with a driver. In order to fix this, you have to update the driver for your battery.

First, click START and CONTROL PANEL. Then, go to SYSTEM AND SECURITY.

“Navigate to System and Security in the Control Panel”

Next, click on DEVICE MANAGER

“Device Manage will show you all the hardware on your computer”

Finally, expand the section marked BATTERY and right click and choose Update Driver Software. You may need your Windows disk to do so.

“Choose your battery and update its drivers”

Of course, if you don’t want to be fiddling around having to navigate through your Operating System and manually having to update drivers, you can run a free diagnostic scan with Driver Reviver to identify not only out of date battery drivers, but any out of date or obsolete driver on your computer. Once you’ve performed a scan, you can quickly and easily update all out of date drivers found with a simple mouse click.

And there you have it. Before heading out to buy a new battery pack if you’re laptop batter is not charging, try these simple steps. With any luck, one of the recommendations should solve the problem if your laptop won’t charge.