Hello all, a few problems have sprung up with my laptop recently. I'm getting a shiny new desktop come Christmas but my laptop is quite handy for school so I'd like for it to work again, and hopefully I can find helpful answers here. I've Googled the first one, but not the second as I don't quite know how to word it. Here they are:

1. My laptop battery has gone wonky. Its new from last Christmas. The laptop seems to recognize the battery is attached but it doesn't seem to draw power from it.

Google turned up a solution of uninstalling the battery driver then reinstalling but this hasn't seemed to have worked. It may however be because of the next problem.


2. Basically every time I restart my laptop, I get an error message saying Windows could not start up (which is true, it gets to the black screen and green loading bar and stays there forever), stating it may be due to a recent hardware change or something of the like. The only thing that seems to work is doing a system restore, which takes nearly an hour.

However this obviously isn't working because I have to do a system restore every time I turn my laptop back on just to get it to work. And it does eventually sort itself out, though often (just now actually (I'm typing this on my phone)) it shows the message during the attempted restore "startup repair cannot repair this computer automatically". Whether the restore works or not, eventually it boots up like new.

Before I pop in my system recovery disks and wipe my laptop to factory settings, I was hoping someone might have a simpler answer. I'm ok with the wipe to default stuff as all my pics, documents, etc. are backed up to disks and/or flash drives already so there's no big hassle there. However I have quite a few games installed and I'd like to avoid having to reinstall all of them after restoring my laptop.

Thanks in advance to any help you can give me!

I know this isn't super helpful, so if any additional info is needed, let me know and I'll add what I can to the somewhat rambling post (again, this is from my phone).

What do the indicator lights for hard drive usage and the like do during boot up when it freezes? Does the hard drive light come on, flicker, or stay solid the entire time?

None of the above. The loading bar keeps moving and the only light that comes on is the one indicating the laptop is on.

No hard drive light indicates a motherboard issue. It's not getting past BIOS to boot to the drive, or the drive is hanging badly.

I don't know if it means anything but during an attempted system restore, the light stays on constantly.