Battery Charging Issue with Elitebook 6930p

[Britton1981]

Hello HP forums, I had to come back here and ask you guys/girls a question about the Elitebook series and the battery not charging issue. I recently purchased this laptop to replace the other two garbage HP laptops that we used to have here. The DV9005 was a total waste of money, and the compaq CQ50 wasn't much better either. This elitebook however has been a more decent experience to use thankfully.

Now its not a brand new laptop, again just can't afford to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars for a computer.  Anyone who does, well good for you.

On to the problem, when I first got the laptop it didn't have the charging adapter or a hard drive. I already had a spare empty drive to use and purchased a generic adapter. About a week later I ended up getting an official adapter branded by HP because I thought it was the problem.

While using the generic adapter the battery would sometimes charge, and other times not charge and would make it to about 97-98% and refuse to charge any further, using the generic china crap adapter. I tried all I could think of and followed the guides on the internet. Removing the battery, uninstalling the drivers for it in device manager, rebooting without the battery, then putting the battery back in. These tactics were all hit and miss and worked but only for a little while. I had pulled the harddrive from the compaq system and used it in this one prior to getting rid of the Compaq. It still had the original install Windows on it and after all that troubleshooting I figured "hey must be an issue with the old hardware drivers from the previous system the drive was in.  So finally I got an official charger (the battery checked out fine in the HP Battery Check software by the way). 

So with the new charger I formatted the hard drive, and installed Windows 7 x64 Ultimate again. Then let its installer and Windows Update find all the drivers and with that the problem seemed to be gone.  I had to manually install some drivers, such as the ATI drivers and the fingerprint scanner (I don't use it though). It now charged to 100% but sometimes its didn't. By this I mean I have to let the battery discharge to below 90% (89% and below) before the system will charge the battery.  Is this normal? Shouldn't the battery charge back up no matter what percentage the cells are at, or is this some kind of special feature that I'm simply unaware of? Another thing is that sometimes the battery will charge extremely fast, and other times drag on for hours. Also a high pitched humming sound can be heard when its charging, like you can hear the electricity doing something. That's the best way I can describe it.

I must note that I have updated the bios, and until recently had installed some (not all) of HP's bloatware, such as the Quick Launch buttons, battery check, the software center crap for the info button on the quick launch panel. I didn't like that stuff though, seems like way to many running processes for a single piece of hardware. I avoided all the other seemingly non essential driver updates from the HP site. The HP software created about 7 processes all related to the quick launch buttons and auto updating. I found that to be unacceptable and removed all of the  HP software, the system operates just fine with out it. Only thing that's odd is the battery and its plugged in not charging status. It charged fine for days until I removed that software, even when it was only a few percent short of 100% charged. Now it's back to the way it was under the generic charger, so I suspect that the generic charger works fine and something else is the problem.

Is the HP software required for normal and proper battery charging? If that is the case it is a bit concerning, when I buy a product that product becomes my property not the sellers anymore, and the fact that your 3rd party software maybe required for normal operations is a slap in the face to consumers everywhere. While I do appreciate HP's attempts to automate and dumb down everything for users who don't know what their doing. You should consider that not everyone needs or wants that type of automated assistance and out right commercialization built right into the system from the factory. Perhaps in future models you will not install the HP software by default.  The mouse pad for example, has one driver and one process for it. I can see what the process is for and it is alright to have it because it is required if I want to use the track pads built in scrolling feature, among other things. Linking the quick launch buttons to the batteries charging action (if that is indeed what is happening here) was/is a horrible idea.

Please correct me if I am wrong on any of this, I await you answer for the battery charging issue, and will provide additional information if necessary.

[Malygris1 · Accepted solution]

Hello @Britton1981

To get your issue more exposure I would suggest posting it in the commercial forums since the [PRODUCT] is a commercial product. You can do this here Notebook - HP ProBook, EliteBook, Compaq, Slate/Tablet PC, Armada, LTE

The support page for your product may be helpful in the meantime: HP EliteBook 6930p Base Model Notebook PC.

I hope this helps!
Thank you for posting on the HP Forums. 

[Britton1981]

Thanks for the reply, however I think this is just normal behavior for this kind of computer. After reading over some other users posts on the topic here, I read where someone said it was just the way Windows handles charging the battery.  The behavior is acceptable though, it reaches 100% if allowed to recharge from less than 90%. Anything over that and it won't charge, which seems odd but I guess it's not. I assume its some kind of feature to help the battery get maximum life expectancy. I just haven't had the computer very long and was unaware that it charged its battery this way.  It's a very nice computer and I find it useful.

Sorry for troubling the forum with this issue.

[princytex]

location of charging ic, power ic, USB ic, display ic, on any laptop board system