Oh crap! your laptop says “plugged in not charging” when you hover over the battery icon. It turns out that you probably do not have anything to worry about.Many newer laptops and batteries are designed not to charge to frequently. Several posts I have found across the internet mention a common “80% charge” feature. This feature keeps a battery’s maximum charge level to 80% in order to extend longevity. Most of the time if you have this feature you can turn it off or on.
There are not many mentions of another common feature. This feature prevents a battery from charging unless the battery is below 90%. This means that if you battery meter says 91% and “plugged in, not charging” you might not need to be concerned.
To test if your system is one of these, unplug and use your laptop till it gets down to say 85%, then plug it in. Wait a minute or two before you check the status. If your laptop is one that has this feature you should now see “plugged in charging”.
Oddly enough you should consider yourself lucky, this means that your laptop is taking special care of your battery to make it last longer. The more you charge and discharge a battery the more you degrade it’s performance over time. This is particularly true of small discharges and recharges. By not charging unless the battery is below 90% you won’t wear out your battery when you unplug your laptop for a short period of time, like moving it from one room to another.
I just wanted to share this because I had this happen and everything I read online talks about hardware problems or windows driver problems. Just try this out first to see if you even need to be worried.
That’s a pretty cool feature, which my laptop did not ship with. Is there some way I can enable it through Windows?
It’s hardware specific feature, so I don’t think you can…. However there may be a third party utility or two out there that will do the same thing.