I wrote this post because I couldn’t find any information on my exact problem on forums. I have a second hand HP Stream 11 which had a dead battery (the battery died as the laptop hadn’t been used for over three months). I had the battery replaced. My Stream runs Ubuntu 18.04.3 and ran well on battery only for many days. It was suspended rather than switched off for approximately four days. One evening when I was using the laptop at approximately 20% battery it suddenly shut down and a blinking light came on near the charge port.

My initial reaction was to plug in the power cable which I realised wasn’t working. So I switched it off and left it plugged into power overnight. Still there was no charge. I unplugged it from power and noticed the light was still blinking near the power cable plug. I left it unplugged while I went to work. When I got home the light had stopped blinking. I plugged it back into power and now an amber light came on instead of the blinking light.

My vague understanding is the Stream must need to drain the battery to reset the battery to once again take a charge? I will also try charging it at around 30% discharge to see if it will start charging and update this post at a later date. It got me worried at first to see the Stream not take a charge after it had reached a critical battery point. As I was at work all day, I am not sure how long it took for the battery to completely drain as it was switched off, and off power as well. The blinking light is the key to this mystery. It is not the same light as the one that goes on in ‘suspended’ mode which is on the other side near the USB ports.

I couldn’t find anything in the BIOS settings to give me clues, or in a whole lot of Google searches which centred around Windows drivers and failed batteries. Hopefully this post helps someone with the same problem. It is a great laptop and I paired it back to CLI and multi user rather than graphical log in to help with battery life and ease distractions from a GUI.

(UPDATE; It looks like the battery has to completely drain each time before recharge, at least while on Ubuntu. So when the light stops flickering near the power port it is ready to recharge. Don’t try and put in the cable or it won’t fully drain.)