I think.

Bought a new battery for my netbook which had been working perfectly (except the battery) for 2 years. Put new battery in, charged it as instructed and now my netbook will only start in low graphics mode and the trackpad won't work.

Is this a massive coincidence or could a shoddy battery actually do this?

I'm going to try and reinstall the OS but if that doesn't work I'll be taking it up with eBay etc, getting an engineers report and asking for a new netbook.

Why not just buy the non-fake genuine battery that you should have bought in the first place? Been running my laptop without a battery for the last year and half as they cost so much and I don't trust a lot of Ebay sellers.

You bought a battery off eBay. Buyer beware unfortunately….they are usually half the price of OEM for a reason. That reason is they usually die after 6 months, but sometimes the effect can be a bit more annoying.

presume you can remove the battery and run off the mains…still a problem ? (if so then it's hard to blame the battery)

presume you can remove the battery and run off the mains…still a problem ? (if so then it's hard to blame the battery)

Not if the battery has caused permanent damage because it's the wrong voltage or something.

Have you even tried mains or the old battery?

How would the wrong voltage cause these problems anyway?

Pretty unlikely for a battery to cause that.

Run a checkdisk before you go any further.

It's booted into safe mode by the sound of it. Perhaps the motherboard has picked up that the battery's weird?

Press F8 a lot as it's rebooting and see if you can select normal boot or something.. Maybe go into the bios and see if there's a setting.

Trackpads only not working as safemode doesn't boot up most drivers.

What happens if/when you restart windows when it asks for your last known good setting?

See I did think it might be cheap & nasty but in a "wouldn't work at all" kinda way. No idea why or how its messed with settings.

It was actually running Linux but I don't have either the boot usb or disc to hand, got to wait till Monday.

Does exactly the same on mains and the original battery is dead dead.

If you take the battery out and run it off just the charger is it ok?

Have you tried turning it off and back on again? 😳

Yes, tried that first. And occasionally keep doing it in an attempt to catch it out!

VERY much doubt the battery has anything to do with it at all. But did you try running it without the battery. What you seem to have there is a software problem. Even if the battery was the wrong voltage, the PSU in the laptop would have some protection against that.

Do you mean it IS running Linux? which OS?

It was actually running Linux but I don't have either the boot usb or disc to hand

Fleay bay is bad for chargers as well!! I bought the Chinese version charger for my toshiba and sometimes when using whilst charging it goes crazy. Clicking on everything as you move the pointer over it etc! Also on several occasions it's managed to reset the clock to 12:00 on my I pod dock whilst it's connected to the computer!!??? Would never leave it on charge whilst not supervising it!
China= bad
Japan = good

It's the 10.4 netbook edition, before that it was 9.10 netbook edition. Both have worked perfectly and the only change is the battery.

Hm, buying cheap gear off ebay and it not working shocker 🙂

Treat eBay as a market – many sellers are the equivalent of dodgy geezers with a suitcase.

Reinstalled the OS, all's good again! Except the battery power remaining thing seems a bit off but I can live with that.

Now, off to the ebay feedback section…

So your old laptop has a shady disc, and you're going to blame your cheap battery for that? Riiiiight.

Battery likely just a coincidence. But batteries and chargers are one thing it pays to buy original.

Who said anything about a shady disc? I installed the same OS off the same disc to an older laptop which is also working perfectly and has downloaded the same updates etc. No probs at all with the netbook until the very first time the new battery is fitted. Given the amount of use it gets (turned on & off several times a day) it seems to be one hell of a coincidence. The battery which, again coincidentally no doubt, subsequently fails to communicate properly with the power monitoring settings…

Having had a look around the net there are quite a lot of reports refering to new batteries sending the BIOS settings haywire which can then cause problems with the OS. In fairness these reports do seem to refer almost exclusively to non-OEM batteries.

So lesson learnt, no more cheap laptop batteries without backing everything up first! (or buy real batteries)