On my Dad's laptop, an Acer TravelMate 2480-2106, he no longer gets the battery meter. The option to show it under task bar and start menu properties is shadowed out. Upon further research I found that the micorsoft composite battery service, listed under the system devices in start manager, had an exclamation mark beside it. Under the properties for that device it said that the service cannot be started (code 10). Later it gave me a code 31 (same problem) after I disabled/re-enabled it. I tried googeling it to find a suggestion to uninstall & restart. After doing so it didn't come back nor did it try to install the driver & he still doesn't have the battery meter. A hardware scan does nothing. When I did have it I tried having MS update the driver but it already had the best driver for it . Further he tried emailing acer but it wouldn't let him. Online support didn't help at all. Both of those was before we knew what the problem was so maybe I'll have him try it again. I was also unable to get to the driver download page or acer's site to work. I don't know what else to do. He has XP pro on this computer & it shows the battery meter but the problem is with vista home basic (SP 1) which is the OS that came with this computer & is the one he uses more.

I know you are a skilled Googler so I won't add Google links but there are many cases of this issue.

I did find a third party app that might work as a work around:

BatteryBar: Better Battery Meter for XP and Vista Notebooks | Notebooks.com

And just to add, although I have no idea if it is an issue here, adding additional operating systems on a single hard drive is often very problematic.

Also ACER support is often problematic. They have so many entry points. Try Global. Try PanAm. Try Notebooks. etc.

acer support - Google Search

Although I would suspect this is a Windows issue.


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Neither windows or the program are detecting his battery. I don't understand what you're saying about the tech support. Will any of those sites in that link provide tech support for acer? Are they official? Do you have any other ideas?

I've had an XP/Vista dual boot on the same drive on my computer for quite some time with no problems. My Dad wanted XP mainly so that he could use active sync for an older PDA that he doesn't want to give up. He only has one drive.

All the Acer sites in that Google are official. They just have a very poor and overly complex setup. Basically you need to find the proper entry point for your location. This one works best for me:

AcerPanAm.com

From there choose your country. US goes to here:

AcerPanAm.com/us

From there you should get to Drivers as well as Tech Support Contact.

Otherwise I have no other ideas at the moment. Since it works in XP but not Vista and as both errors 10 & 31 are driver errors that would appear to be what to try.

I find most Microsoft drivers fairly useless. You might try reloading the drivers from ACER.

Make sure you load Vista drivers and not XP.


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