several months ago the HP TouchPad stopped working. We bought it back during the fire sale in 2011, so it's had a decent run, but for a device that was 90% of the time plugged in and used as a kitchen tablet (for recipes, etc), it feels like the device should have lasted longer.

Turns out there are a slew of posts from 2012 and 2013 where people started having issues powering the device on It wouldn't charge, or if it got too low, the device wouldn't power on and you had to do all sorts of weird tricks (button presses, charging on a lower power charger, etc). Or it would the file system was corrupt and preventing it from booting.

Chris tried all of the various charging and button mashing suggestions last year in an attempt to revive the device, and I repeated some of those yesterday, including the overnight lower power charge at 1A instead of 2A. Nothing.

So I decided to pop the case open and have a look. Taking the whole thing apart was kind of a nightmare to get to the battery. You unplug everything, including microphone, camera, wifi antenna, etc just so that you can pull up the housing to get to the underside and unplug the battery. This device was seriously more frustrating than it needed to be to take apart.

I did confirm 100% that the battery is dead and didn't take a single charge in the last 20 hours. Since it was possible the device was stuck in a boot loop (and thus appeared to be dead) I wanted to rule out that it was indeed the battery.

And it is.

Now to decide if it's worth investing $30 in a battery to maybe fix the problem or just give up. It is entirely possible that there's an issue with the motherboard preventing charging or it could just be the battery needs to be replaced.

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