Not charging at all is usually not the battery
If the machine runs fine on mains but shows no charging activity, suspect the charger and the port before the battery. Chargers fail more often than batteries do, and charging ports take a lot of mechanical abuse — every time the cable gets yanked, the solder joints underneath take the strain.
A port that only works when you hold the cable at an angle is a port, not a battery, and no amount of replacing batteries will fix it.
Draining fast is the battery, and that is normal
Lithium cells lose capacity with every charge cycle. A three or four-year-old laptop holding half its original runtime has not broken — it has aged exactly as designed. Windows will show you: search for a battery report and it gives you design capacity against current capacity.
If it is under about 60%, replacement is reasonable. If it is at 90% and dying in an hour, something is draining it and that is a software problem, not a hardware one.
Things worth trying first, free
Try a different charger if you can borrow one — that single test separates charger from laptop faster than anything else.
Check the port for lint. It sounds trivial and it is a genuinely common cause, particularly on machines carried in bags.
Look at what is running. A browser with forty tabs, or something mining away in the background, will flatten a healthy battery quickly.
What it costs
Diagnostic is $50/hr and it is usually quick — separating charger, port and battery does not take long with the right tools. Batteries and charge ports are quoted once we know which one you need, because the part price varies enormously by model.
On some slim laptops the battery is glued in and the labour outweighs the part. We will tell you that before you commit rather than after.
When it is worth bringing in
If the machine only runs on mains, you are carrying a desktop around and one power cut from losing work. That is worth fixing even if nothing else is wrong.
Bring it in sooner if the charger or the machine gets hot at the connection, if the cable has visible damage, or if you have started propping the plug at an angle to make it work. Those are the ones that stop being a repair and start being a hazard.
Pick-up and return is $50 anywhere in the Edmonton area if you would rather not make the trip, and remote support cannot help with this one — charging faults are physical by definition.
Answered plainly.
Is it worth replacing a battery in an old laptop?
Depends what the machine is worth to you. On a five-year-old laptop that is otherwise fine, a battery is usually good value. On one that is also slow, an SSD at $120 often does more for how it feels to use.
Can you tell if it is the charger without buying one?
Usually, yes. We can measure what the charger is actually delivering, which is faster and cheaper than buying a replacement to find out.
My laptop only works when plugged in. Is that dangerous?
Not dangerous, but you have effectively got a desktop. It is normally a dead battery or a charging circuit fault, and both are worth diagnosing.
Do you fix charging ports?
Yes, where the board allows it. It is a soldering job rather than a swap, so we quote it after looking at the specific machine.
Not quite your problem? Start the troubleshooter and it will narrow it down, or see what everything costs.
Tell us what it’s doing.
Quotes are free, and we point you at the cheapest thing that actually solves it.