After not using my Acer Aspire One netbook for a couple of months I needed it again for school. It didn’t boot, as the battery was completely discharged. I tried recharging the battery but that didn’t work. Even after a couple of hours charging, the battery indicator in the task bar still said it was charged for 0%. It seemed to be a problem with its BIOS, the netbook simply didn’t recognize its battery anymore.

The BIOS on the netbook was an old version, with known problems that after fully discharging, the battery no longer holds a charge. This can be fixed easily by updating the BIOS to version 3309 or higher. The updating process is windows based, so even if you’re not a geek you’ll be able to fix the problem yourself.

Use a seperate computer or your netbook to download the latest version of the BIOS here. Select your netbook, which is mentioned as AOA150 and download the BIOS by clicking on the BIOS tab. Extract the .zip file you just downloaded (or copy it to an USB memory stick if you downloaded it on another computer, and transfer it to your netbook).

There are two ways of updating the BIOS. I only tried one -in my opinion the easiest way to do it-, running a windows program that updates the BIOS for you. If you choose to do it that way too, double click on the file ‘insydeflash.exe’.

A little program, like shown above, will pop up. Click ‘start’ to initiate the update. When the update is finished your netbook will reboot and should be able to charge its battery again.