I recently experienced a problem where my Lenovo P51 laptop would not charge even when the AC adapter was connected. Not only did the little battery icon in Windows not show the charging lightning bolt, but the charging LED next to the power port would not light up.
If I shutdown the unit using a "hard" shutdown (Hold "Shift" while selecting "Shut down") then the power charging LED light would come on and my laptop would begin charging. However when I logged back in to Windows, the LED would turn off and the unit wouldn't charge anymore.
Note that while the login screen was displaying the unit would keep charging, it was only after I logged in that the unit stopped charging.
I tried all of the usually suggested steps including
- Going into "Device Manager", uninstalling all the "Battery" related drivers and rebooting.
- Going into "System Configuration" and disabling every startup service and rebooting (i.e. performing a "clean" boot)
The problem was that I was using "Airplane Mode" on my laptop to force it to use the hard ethernet connection rather than the Wifi. In addition to this in the "Lenovo Vantage" app, under the "Power" settings, "Airplane Power Mode" was enabled.
What I *think* was happening is that Lenovo Vantage somehow thought that if my laptop was in "Airplane Mode" then it shouldn't allow the unit to charge up.
I fixed the problem by disabling the "Airplane Power Mode" setting in the "Lenovo Vantage" app. I guess it could also be fixed by turning off "Airplane Mode" as well.
I sincerely hope this information solves this issue for someone else and saves them from the hours of troubleshooting that I had to go through.
