Sometimes laptop will charge if I plug in it, but sometimes won't?
Sometimes laptop will charge if I plug in it, but sometimes won't?
Hey, I bought this Asus Z13 laptop back a while ago. It's a refurbished one, so it was supposed to be ready. But lately, sometimes my battery runs out right when I'm playing games, even though the power is on. The charger came with 100W and that should be enough for gaming. The problem is I don't know why some times work fine but not others. I talked to Asus support and they didn't say much. I already tried a few things:
- Updating Windows 11 and drivers.
- Upgrading the BIOS or firmware.
- Buying a new charger from the same brand to see if that fixed it (it didn't).
- Plugging in at different outlets.
- Draining the battery and charging it again.
- Holding the power button down for 30 seconds or more.
- Trying to unplug and replug the charger since it's a USB-C port. I also ran some system reports using the command line, but nothing weird came up there. So what else can I try? Or should I just give up on this laptop and send it back for repairs? Thanks so much in advance!
I did some tests lately and think I found something cool about it. I recently bought a USB-C power meter to learn more. What I learned is that my notebook actually gets 20V, but usually, it stops at only 1.5A while it could use up to 5A. This means the charger sends max 35W when it can send up to 100W with 5A. (Both of my chargers show this behavior so I think the problem isn't the charger itself). However, I found a way around it: if I plug in the charger while playing a game, the charger goes past the 1.5A limit and starts charging normally. If I quit the game and the charge drops back below 1.5A, the charger gets stuck at 1.5A again and I have to do the hack one more time to get full power. This happens all the time. Based on this info, could it be a hardware problem or a BIOS/firmware bug?