Battery Charge dependent on time

[Stakes]

Hi good folk,

This a quite a tale.

Of all my years sitting in front of a computer never have I tought the following would happen to me. One day I returned from work looking to charge my 1 year old Toshiba laptop. After about 15 minutes of activity I notice that my remaining battery charge was dropping instead of, well charging. I hovered overed the Battery icon in the lower right corner and the message read: " Plugged in, not charging ". Being a new generation kid I immediately hopped on google to try and solve this. After reading through a dozen articles about said problem I did the following (please note that I have a sealed  in battery - stupid I know): " Uninstalled the battery drivers, restarted the pc, plug out and plugged in the AC charger.

But to no avail. Immediately saddened by the fact because I knew my laptop was getting old (14 months) and the battery wasnt the best (2,5 Hours) but this problem appeared so suddenly that I couldnt help but feel a bit cheated. I went to bed early and decide to leave the charger in my laptop for the night. Surprisingly it charged as I woke in the morning and as a test I left it to charge with no activity for the entire day. But as luck would have its way it stopped charging in the afternoon.

I repeated this and noticed a pattern. Roughly between 10pm and 1pm it would charge and the other part of the day it would not. I confirmed this by changing my pc time to those periods and Voila! it would charge. To be honest I do not know if this a software or hardware problem but I need to find a fix because I plan on using this pc for another six months to eight months.

Any suggestions,
Steven

[Geek-9pm]

Short answer: Buy a battery. Use both.
Long answer: Thanks for staring, your keen observations confirm what meany users have already found. Neely, the battery life and recharge rate are not  exact calculations.
Also, the algorithm used by software for calculating battery condition is flawed. It uses a table the only represents an approximation of battery charge.

Do you want to perjure this further? The technical reading is very boor. But we have some experts here that are good about making hard stuff simple. Maybe they will give it a try. 

[BC_Programmer]

Though this can also be caused by the battery being bad or losing the ability to hold a charge, another cause can be the AC Adapter/Power brick. If it doesn't deliver enough power to the system then the battery won't be able to charge.

Doesn't make a lot of sense that it would only do that at certain times, though.

[Geek-9pm]

Doesn't make a lot of sense that it would only do that at certain times, though.

The OP did not mention where he lives. In some areas the line voltage might vary as much as 20% during a 24 hour period. Some chargers do not correct for voltage sag.
Also, temperature variation during the day. Some  charging systems have poor temperature compensation.

And when batteries get old and near end-of-life the performance becomes erratic.

But it could be the charger.

About three years ago USA today hard this story:
The sad lifespan of a laptop battery
It has not got much better. 

[Stakes]

I dont think you guys get it. Let me put it this way:

Between 1pm and 10pm it doesn't charge. Between 10:01 pm and 12:59 pm it charges. (PC TIME). So if I change my PC time to eg. 4 AM or 11 AM it will charge. If i change it back to say 2pm it won't.

[Geek-9pm]

OK. Important detail not mentioned earlier.
That detail indicates that the charger is on a schedule. It was by design.
The life of your battery can be extended by reducing the number and frequency of charge cycles. . Some think that a trick recharge is better. Wrong. The engineers say the battery should undergo deep and less frequent charge cycles.
From Google:

I have fully drained the lithium batteries for my laptops several time without any issues. I would say you should simply re-charge the battery once it drops to 5%. Regarding "over-charging" or keeping the laptop plugged into the AC outlet all the time when the battery is at 100%... This is generally a bad thing to do.Feb 24, 2014

[BC_Programmer]

I dont think you guys get it.

Good luck with your issue. 

[camerongray]

What level is it on when it says "Plugged in, not charging" - A lot of laptops do this when the battery is nearly full (e.g. 98%) instead of charging the laptop to the max.  This helps prolong the lifespan of the battery.

[BC_Programmer]

What level is it on when it says "Plugged in, not charging" - A lot of laptops do this when the battery is nearly full (e.g. 98%) instead of charging the laptop to the max.  This helps prolong the lifespan of the battery.

If what they are saying is accurate then they can change the time on their computer and "control" when it charges. That doesn't seem consistent with that behaviour to me.

Particularly odd would be that the laptop is older and the behaviour is presumably something that appeared more recently.