I recently managed to swap the hard drives between my old HP laptop and an older Dell laptop that had a fried hard drive. Everything seemed fine at first—I factory reset the Dell, which took about 12 hours overnight. It was running great all day, but when I unplugged it to move to my bed, it went from 100% to low battery and shut off in about five minutes! When I plugged it back in, it struggled to boot up and then spent a lot of time on a blue screen before going black. It's currently doing a Windows cleanup. I'm getting really worried since I've been using it for online school and haven't saved anything elsewhere. I know very little about laptops and I'm freaking out a bit!
4 Answers
If you're dropping from 100 to nearly 0% in just a few minutes, it's definitely a sign that the battery needs replacement. Laptop batteries don’t last forever; they're rated for a certain number of charge cycles. The Windows update lag is likely normal due to the drive swap, so just let it catch up, and it should be monthly updates after that.
It sounds like your battery is failing and can’t hold a charge anymore. You should be careful about storing important files on that laptop until you stabilize it, because if it crashes again, you could lose everything.
Thanks! I’m planning on saving everything onto my phone until I can get a new battery, LOL.
If your laptop is pretty old, check out eBay for used batteries. You might even find another laptop for a similar price, and you can swap the hard drives instead or save your work and do a fresh Windows install.
Just keep your laptop plugged in while using it for now. Let it handle the updates without interruption. It might be alright as long as it stays powered.
I’m on it now, just keeping it plugged in. I guess I’ll stop moving it off the charger for a while. Thanks!
Thanks! Any suggestions on where to find cheap batteries?