Laptop always shows "On AC Power" even when on battery? Here's one solution you can try.

Is your laptop behaving like a desktop computer? Does it show it's on AC power all the time even when you are on battery power?

If you happen to answer "yes" then ... you have the same problem as mine. The most annoying part is when you forget to turn on the power and you are running on battery but it says "on AC power" ... then all of a sudden .... without any warnings and notifications ... your laptop just goes blank .... completely shuts down without the sequence. All your unsaved work goes with it.

Been searching for quite a while on how to fix this but lots of the time I ran into a dead end. you'd be surprised of how many people have the same problem.

In my case, it seems that I'm lacking a certain driver in my system which handles the AC/DC power monitoring.

You can try searching for the solution on your own but I gotta tell you ... its not easy ... fortunately though ... I'm kind enough to share this with you so you don't have to search any further hahaha...

But first let me just credit the person who helped us .. this person's name supposedly is Davey with a nickname dOGHAIR..

LIMITATION: This method is for Windows XP only ... I havent tried on Windows Vista nor Windows 7.
DISCLAIMER: This method is pretty harmless but that been said, use this method AT YOUR OWN RISK.

You can download a zipped file which contains a batch file that will repair the missing battery icon issue. All you gotta do is extract the file then go to the extracted folder and double-click the "install.bat" file. Keep on pressing "enter' until the whole thing is finished.

When it's done .. right-click "My Computer" then click "Manage". Select "Device Manager" under the "Computer Management (Local)" tree.

Make sure you have these two items ... under "Batteries" on the right side of the panel.

1.  Microsoft AC Adapter

2.  Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery

* please refer to the picture

Make sure the battery icon has no question mark or exclamation mark. If for some reasons it has ... restart you laptop. When that doesn't fix the problem, uninstall them by right-clicking them and choosing "Uninstall". Then repeat the "Install.bat" process.

The next step is to enable the icon in the taskbar .... go to "Start > Run" and keyin "powercfg.cpl" .... click on the "Advance" tab and "check" the "Always show icon on taskbar"

You should also have a "Power Meter" tab next to "Advance" tab ... "check" the "Show details for each battery" ... you should see battery icon there. When you unplug the AC power, you should see the AC plug icon turns into a battery icon.

That's just about it ... hope it solves your problem.

Files to download:

http://spaz.org/~davey/battery_fix_by_dOGHAIR.zip

Credits goes to Davey a.k.a dOGHAIR