Laptop Plugged in Won’t Charge

I just experienced the problem of my having my laptop plugged in but not charging. The problem came out of the blue, when I purchased a new adapter for my laptop. I put back in the old adapter, but my laptop (HP Spectre 360) still wouldn’t charge.

Given the timing and the fact that my laptop is in otherwise perfect condition, I thought that I probably had a device manager problem as opposed to a hardware problem. Basically, I figured that the new adapter may have confused my laptop. Turns out, I was right.

Here’s how I fixed the problem.

How to Fix Laptop Plugged in Won’t Charge

If your charging problem, like mine, is not due to hardware, you may be able to fix it quite easily. Here are the steps:

1. Get to the search box for your computer. On some computers this might mean the Windows Start button. On other computers, it may mean getting out of the desktop and getting into the Start Screen. You can get there by pressing the Window key on your computer. This is normally next to your alt key on the left of your keyboard.
2. Once you are in the search box, type “device manager”.
   1. You want to be careful in the Device Manager. You can mess things up, so please be careful. 
3. Now that you are in Device Manager, look for Batteries or Battery. Expand this by pressing on the + symbol to the left of the word Batteries.
   1. Once you expand it, you will see one or more items referring to power adapters or Microsoft ACPIO-compliant control or something along those lines.
4. Delete the information that shows up in the Batteries section. Don’t try to delete the word Batteries/Battery. Instead, you want to delete the named adapters. There were two in mine, so I deleted both.
5. Shut down and unplug your computer. Wait a minute or so and reboot.
6. Hopefully this will solve your problem.
7. If your problem is still not solved, you can start over and add in some more steps. You may also just want to follow this process from the beginning.
8. After you repeat all of the original steps and shut down the computer, remove both the plug and the battery.
9. Hold down the power button for 60 seconds.
10. Put back in the battery and plug the adapter back in.
11. Reboot.
12. If your problem is not resolved, you will need to look for additional solutions at this point.