A friends has a notebook computer and she tells me that her battery wasn not charging fully, but she was able to use it with the plug and now even when she plugs it in the notebook does not come on. could this be because of a dead battery and that why it was not charging at one point and now it does not start at all? also is replacing the battery a cure for this and is it easy to replace like. help for the helpless!

Replacing the battery is the place to start.

thanks i wil try and see what happens

In the meantime, your friend could try removing the battery completely and running it just on mains power - some systems will, some won't. At least she'll have access (assuming the system accepts this) whilst she waits for a new battery.

I took the battery off and it works uh kinda, I believe the battery is dead and i order one. the problem i have is when i had the notebbok on for awhile the screen turn black I believe it was still running. I turned it off and try to restart but the display did not turn on. the on light came on though. then I waited a few minute and it came on but after a minute or two it turned off again. Could this be something with the battery not being there (It happened earlier when I had the battery in it and it was not charging) or is the notebbok overheating? Any suggestion ? I been reading a fw ost on notebbok pc and they seem like they are a pain. But who am i so say. Anyway thanks for any and all response.

Turning off by itself is usually just the power management.
right click the desktop and select properties>screen saver>power.
If you set everything to 'always on' the machine shouldn't power itself down. When you get the new battery, bear in mind that you may need to go through several charge/discharge cycles before the batttery will actually reach it's maximum capacity (I got one recently, and had to do this around 15 times!)
Let us know how you get on.

Thank you. i will not get the battery until a few days, how do you discharge a battery? I been seeing that alot about charging and discharging and did not know you had to do that with a new battery.

It's more common with nickel metal hydrides. With a bit of luck there will be a utility in the bios of the computer which allows you to perform the discharge - I've got an old FIC (badged Tiny) and I enter the bios and tell it to perform a battery refresh (can't remember offhand where in the bios this was - I'll get back to you!) - you just run the battery down with no PSU attached.
Some manufacturers use a floppy disk utility - here's a link to packard bell's
http://support.packardbell.com/uk/mypc/index.php?PibItemNr=REFFIUP03920200&PibItemParent=platform_7521N
I haven't used this, but I assume it's a simple program that will just run and run until the battery fails - as it is from a floppy, it isn't going to corrupt anything on the hdd.

What I do to kill my battery is make a bootable disk and include the following file on the disk.

First make a folder called tank place a couple of hundred megabytes of files in there.

Make an empty folder called tank2
***************************************
KILL.BAT
@ echo off
cls
echo Discharging battery
:start
move c:\tank\*.* c:\tank2
move c:\tank2\*.* c:\tank
goto start
***********************************
Boot with the floppy and there will be no windows running.
at the A:\> Prompt type jjill and press enter and wait for the power to go off.

When the power goes off, plug in the power and let the battery charge overnight and repaeat the process.

thanks i will giver it a try when i get the new battery

The direction on the battery i got said to run it and let it die before charging and do it over about 5 times. But it seems to be working and I change the setting in the power management to shut off monitor after 2 hr instead of 15 min it seems to be working. will keep posted if any other problems. thanks again for the help