Spectre x360 won't charge or power on, battery light blinks 3 times

[jurm]

Recently the battery status icon in the notification area of my notebook's screen began to display the "plugged in, battery not charging" text that has plagued so many others.

I recently fixed this problem on my sister's cheaper HP notebook by uninstalling the battery's driver, removing its battery after shutting down, and then restarting the computer. The battery in my Spectre X360 notebook is not removable like hers, but I finally succeeded in temporarily solving my own problem with a hard reset instead (effected by depressing the power button for 15 seconds, and then restarting).

When the plugged-in-but-not-charging problem soon re-appeared, however, I tried the same fix a second time, but  found that now my Spectre X360 will not restart at all; depressing the power button only causes the battery light to blink 3 times.

I know that the AC adapter is functional. By plugging it into the notebook I can cause the orange "battery-charging" LED to display, although I don't believe that it is actually now charging the battery, because the LED never changes to a steady white glow no matter how long I leave the AC cable plugged in. Recently when the notebook was booted I ran a battery check in the HP Support Assistant, and it reported that the battery itself is functional, too.

I have read other reports that the blinking-battery-light problem is caused by a faulty motherboard, which HP is charging $500+ to replace-- despite the evident prevalence of the problem-- on an out-of-warranty notebook. I am already running my Spectre X360 on an HP replacement motherboard, because only two months after I'd purchased the notebook in April 2015 it abruptly switched itself off to black, and afterwards played completely dead.

After HP returned my Spectre X360 from warranty service in June 2015 I eventually discovered two shortcomings of the replacement hardware that it had installed:

1) the replacement motherboard lacks the hardware sensors necessary to disable  keyboard input and enable automatic screen orientation when I try to use the X360 in tablet mode, rendering this expensive feature of the computer completely unusable; and

2) the notebook will not power on when the AC cable is plugged in, but will only boot on battery power.

This latter defect precludes use of any troubleshooting measure that disables the battery after shutdown.

My Spectre X360 is full of expensive licensed software and personal work that, although backed up, would be difficult to transfer to a new machine, so if HP insists upon charging me $500+ to fix for the problem that I just I've described I imagine that I will knuckle under and pay. But this third motherboard must finally fix all of the power-supply issues once and for all, and allow me to make use of the tablet-mode capability that this model so prominently advertises.

[rick-s]

@jurm

I have brought your issue to the attention of an appropriate team within HP. They will likely request information from you in order to look up your case details or product serial number. Please look for a private message from an identified HP contact. Additionally, keep in mind not to publicly post personal information (serial numbers and case details).

If you are unfamiliar with how the Forum's private message capability works, you can learn about that here.

Thank you for visiting the HP Support Forum.

[jurm]

Update:

Since writing my last post I finally succeeded in booting my notebook. Repeatedly replugging in the AC adapter until I managed to get an orange glow from the battery LED indicating that recharging was in process, and monitoring the recharging process to restore the orange glow when it intermittently disappeared, I succeeded after about two days in producing a steady white glow from the battery LED, and after booting the X360 verified that its battery was fully charged.

Since then I don't get the "plugged in, not charging" message balloon over the battery icon in the notification area as often, and on the few occasions that this has happened I've been able to fix that symptom with a hard reset. But even when the notebook reports that the AC adapter is plugged in and the battery is charging, the battery seems to drain quickly when the notebook is in use (and when it's not the recharging process, as already described, seems to take a long time).

And frequently, on the other hand, the X360 now fails to realize that the AC adapter is plugged in. When this happens (or after I lose the power connection because the loose-fitting  plug just slips out of its socket in the side of the notebook), I usually have to unplug the AC adapter both from the notebook and the AC power source, plug the adapter back into the source wall socket, and then plug it back into the X360, before the X360 will realize that its AC adapter is plugged in.

Sometimes, however, this voodoo doesn't work. On these occasions I've been able to temporarily fix the problem by uninstalling the Microsoft AC Adapter driver in the Device Manager and rebooting.

So for the time being I can use my computer. But I continue to fear that someday the battery will completely discharge when the notebook is shut down and that I will be unable to sufficiently recharge it. As I wrote in my original post, since Hewlett-Packard returned this computer to me in 2015 after its work on CSO#************, it refuses to boot at all when the AC adapter is plugged in.