Electronics

[plc123]

I have a toshiba laptop with windows 7. Was working great and now i turned it on to charge battery and run the virus scanner. I have it plugged in and it came on for about 15 minutes and then shut down and now it's not charging or coming on at all. Ive never had a laptop before so is it shot? Thanks in advanced. I know nothing about computers or laptops.

[software]

If you've had it more than about 3-4 years, depending on how much you use it, your battery may be bad.

@plc123

[hoosieroriginal]

Sometimes my HP will shut down automatically for no reason - give it another try.  I keep mine plugged in all the time.  The thing I would hate about that is I love Windows 7 and the new computers all have Windows 10.

[plc123]

It is at least 4 years old. So maybe a battery? It just seemed strange that one minute it worked fine and the next it shut off. I have tried several times to turn it on and it won't. I have even tried different plug in's but nothing. Thanks

[Ibby114]

If it's not coming on at all it could be the hard drive. I recently had issues with my Toshiba and the techies at work told me that's an indication of a bad hard drive- I was able to boot up my laptop but it kept crashing. My issues turned out to be a corrupt operating system file. Yes, it's Windows 10!  I have to back up what I need-   and they're reimaging the computer (with Windows 8 )  this week.

[ValuSkr]

My guess is that the battery needs to be replaced.  The rechargeable batteries don't last forever, but I'd have thought you would have seen a gradual reduction in its charging ability.

[gardenman]

Hard drive failures typically either stop you at the BIOS screen as the computer searches for a hard drive and can't find one, or you get an error message that the hard drive has failed.

This sounds like a power issue more than anything. For absolutely nothing to happen, no BIOS screen, no error messages, it's typically going to be a power issue (power supply in a desktop, battery or failed power adapter in a laptop) and that gives you no response. In this case my best bet would be the power block that supplies the power to the laptop. Laptops don't get the full 120 volts AC, there's typically a "brick" (transformer) that steps down the voltage to something more usable by the computer, (often 12 V DC) and those transformers are prone to dying zat an annoyingly frequent rate.

Since the computer isn't working plugged in, my guess would be that your brick has gotten fried. The good news is they're commonly available at a low price and you don't have to buy a "name brand" version. I'm betting your computer had enough juice in it's battery to last fifteen minutes and then bled that power out even though it was plugged in, since the brick wasn't sending any power to the computer. 

If it's not the brick, then you might be looking at a motherboard failure, but that's significantly less likely.  Try a new brick with the same ratings as your old one (there's typically a label on them telling you the output voltage) and you might just be good to go. 

[millieshops]

I had a laptop die like that one before I went to my current one.  It turned out that it needed a massive cleaning and then it worked again.  I had already bought this replacement so I asked the tech to delete everything personal for me and then donate it. 

This laptop is now 5 years old and like yours @plc123it has Windows 7 and I'd like to continue with 7 for a while even though I know one of these days I'll have to learn a new system.  I'm already over the average age of a laptop.

[ChynnaBlue]

It could be a lot of things, from the battery to a charging circuit on the internal board to many other things. If the computer is 4 years old, it's probably not worth repairing if it's more serious than the battery. You may want to see if you can find a local computer repair shop to give you a diagnosis and then decide what to do from there.

I have an old HP with a bad battery and it works as long as it's plugged in and then shuts down the minute I unplug the cable because the battery has zero charge.

Do you have the hard drive backed up somewhere you can access the contents of the computer? If not, you might also want to talk to a computer tech about how you can recover the content of the hard drive without repairing the computer itself. They should be able to help you with that, moving the contents to a temporary storage device or location until you can move it to a new system.

[plc123]

 am not going to put much money in it but i did noticed yesterday the battery was fully charged and when i turned it on today it was almost  dead so i plugged it in and then it shut down about 15 minutes later. I did a live chat with Best Buy about a battery and they thought thats what it sounded like. I really don't use it that much. I have a desktop i use all the time.