Laptop battery...

[tenfoot]

IBM T60 running LMDE 201109. As the battery was not charging I thought it had reached the end of its useful life. So I purchased a new battery this week and had it charging through the power lead for 8 hours yesterday and again today but the meter still records no charge. This is confirmed, because when I unplug the power lead the machine stops.

Can someone please help me as to what steps I should take to determine which part of the laptop charging system may be faulty.

[Oscar799]

Moved here by moderator

[StewArt]

Strange. It doesn't seem like it'd be the battery, since you just replaced it, or the power supply, since it runs the machine okay, so it has to be something in between, which gets much harder to check/fix. Of course it's possible you got a no-good battery, just not likely. What lights does the T60 have? Do they show it charging when it's plugged in? (On my laptop, the light is orange when charging, green when almost charged, and off when not charging or fully charged.) Were you charging with the computer on or off?

I assume you've made sure the battery is clipped in all the way, contacts clean, etc. The meter you mention is the one on-screen in LMDE, right? (Some batteries have a charge indicator directly on them.)

[dbkblk]

Do you have Windows or a livecd of Ubuntu to check if the battery load up otherwise ? Always use another OS with a live cd to check for hardware failure, this way you can be sure that it isn't a configuration / kernel problem !