I have a laptop that sometimes shuts down unexpectedly. It's a six year old laptop, bought second hand, that came with a new battery, but not from the laptop manufacturer. I installed Fedora Linux on it.
I've noticed that about every other week the laptop battery starts blinking orange and white after startup. That is normally a sign that I should shutdown, remove the battery and insert it again, reboot and all is good. This is with the power cable connected!
A while ago I installed Windows 10 Pro, which came with the laptop, along with Linux as dual boot.
Linux now runs without much issues, but working with Windows there's no day without sudden reboots. The screen goes black, and when I press the power button to boot, all apps are where I left them, so my guess is that the machine went to sleep.
- Can I see what has happened and why?
- If there was a glitch with the battery, making Windows decide to go to sleep, I would like to disable that option.
Update:
The problem is battery related. I can see reports in the Events that the battery is low, while at the same time the laptop is connected to network power. So there should be no power issue, as there is net power. However, this is what happens.
The battery is relatively new, but not from Dell (no brand name on it), so it could very well be that the connector is bad. When I remove the battery, all problems are gone and the laptop keeps running all day.
I think it's stupid that Windows doesn't recognise that there is net power, and still decides to go to sleep. I'm probably going to remove the cells and connector from this battery, then put the battery case back because of the rubber foot.
Solution
I bought a new official Dell battery. Since then the problem the laptop works and doesn't go to sleep when using Windows.
I would still like to see how you can stop Windows from letting the laptop go to sleep when it thinks the battery is low (with the risk of losing data when the battery really is low).