With no indication as to why, the battery light of my laptop started blinking red yesterday. Normally it is green when charging, red when nearly empty and off otherwise. It shouldn't be blinking, ever. But it did.

Turning off the laptop, reinserting the battery, leaving it out for a while, none of this helped to stop the light from blinking. Some closer inspection showed that when not connected to AC power, the battery was discharging and Linux could read out the status just fine. However, when connected to AC power, the battery would not charge, and the status would be "unknown"!

I tried swapping the battery with my old one, which worked just fine. This seemed to suggest that my battery had somehow got broken. Since I've only bought the battery a few months back, I was already dreading having to deal with MSI support yet again. To confirm that the problem was in fact with the battery and not my laptop, I put my battery in Brenda's laptop (who has the highly similar S271). There, it worked like it should, giving a fancy green light. However, when I put the battery back into my own laptop, all the problems were gone and it charged normally again...

I'm still not completely sure what happened, but it seems like the battery got into some state that my S270 couldn't fix, but the newer S271 perhaps could? Oh well, glad it's working again, now let's hope it won't break again...