HP Laptop and Battery Question

[rkoenn]

I am working on a laptop for a friend. The machine had been running smoothly but recently started crashing errantly and exhibiting other odd behavior such as not initially booting, just a blank screen when powered up which required numerous on button depressions along with F10 key to get into BIOS. I had worked on this 5 months ago and it was fine then.

The girl told me she had left it sitting and on in the carpet recently which may have overheated it. So two days ago I ran a continuous run of Tufftest on it to cycle and test the hardware with the battery and wall power being used.. When I returned to the system an hour later it was completely off. Yesterday I ran the test again with the battery removed running on wall power alone. Tufftest ran for over 3 hours and when I terminated it there were no hardware errors detected.

So my question is can a quirky/faulty battery cause a laptop to crash, not boot reliably, be unstable even if the laptop has wall power as well as the battery.

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

 

[corkyg]

In order to diagnose the instability, suggest you remove the battery completely, and then run the system on A/C only. If the instability persists, then you know it is not the battery. If it runs stable, then you can be inclined to blame the battery.

 

[JasonCoder]

Definitely. I have a 5-6 year old HP laptop with a dead battery. Runs plugged into the wall full time. Had this odd hitch every 5 seconds or so until I flashed the bios. Didn't show up until the battery died a couple years back.