Dell charging issues. Maybe?

[adsm08]

Ok, long and short:

Latitude D630. Worked fine this morning except for a few issues with Windows. Kept crashing, wouldn't load Explorer on it's own on start up. You know, the usual.


Backed up my stuff and formatted it. New install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit blah blah blah.....


All is working well except... if I unplug it it while it's on, when I plug it back in it tells me I have no batteries in and that it is plugged in, not charging.

If I wait a few minutes it will find the battery again, a few % lower than when I unplugged it, and still tell me that it is plugged in and not charging.

I haven't let it off long enough to lose one of the green lights on the battery's on-board test, so I don't know if it is actually not charging or not. I also didn't have my vRAM reset to my personal settings (I am upgrading my pRAM to the max on Thursday when the parts come in).

When I restart it the battery always comes up as full and everything appears normal. I know Dell has had charging system issues in the past and I think that is what worries me more than anything. Have not had a chance to check for Dell updates, all Windows updates are current. Any input from an actual IT professional?

 

[adsm08]

After letting it run overnight in sleep, I believe this may be a refreshing issue, not a charging issue.

 

[cody93]

all the laptops ive had charge the battery via self contained charging circuit, not thru the OS, altho im not sure about the very newest ones, im sure there charging method is a self contained circuit still.

 

[adsm08]

Dell does some screwy stuff with their BIOS to affect the charging circuit. There are parts and programs to ID the charger being used and if it isn't all working properly it doesn't charge at all. The only reason I even thought the two might be related is because it worked, I formatted the hard drive to replace a corrupted install of Windows, and then it didn't work. Always look at what changed before anything else.

I have confirmed its a refreshing issue, not a charging issue. I left it sleep on the battery all night and plugged it in this morning while I played Halo and messed on TRS. When I plugged it in it took 5 minutes to show it was plugged in, and then it acted as described above. After 2 hours I looked down and it said "fully charged".

I just threw it to 4G physical memory on top of my 5 gig paging file. Hopefully that will make this go away, although the memory upgrade was planned and paid for before this issue cropped up.

 

[AllanD]

This is why Dell has never had a problem with their lithium Ion rechargeable batteries EXPLODING like the problem Apple had several years ago.

Dells may be slightly "twitchy" about the charger used but dell chargers are generally cheap enough...

 

[AllanD]

Watching "power options" will mislead you because it does not "Refresh" while you watch it

I have an active 610M (running XP)
and two 1525's (both running Windows 7) that all display the same way.

Wanna get confused? watch power options while the 610M is charging... it has dual batteries. (the second battery lives in the hot swappable optical drive bay)

 

[adsm08]

Watching "power options" will mislead you because it does not "Refresh" while you watch it

I have an active 610M (running XP)
and two 1525's (both running Windows 7) that all display the same way.

Wanna get confused? watch power options while the 610M is charging... it has dual batteries. (the second battery lives in the hot swappable optical drive bay)

Oh, I'm well familiar with that. The real issue is that is doesn't refresh at all until I put it to sleep.

At ALL. So if I unplug and to back to the bedroom my battery will die before the power management system kicks in and alerts me to a low battery or anything like that. In fact, if the lid hasn't been closed at all the task bar will still show I'm plugged in when it dies.

Fortunately the flashing red indicator is controlled by the BIOS and not Windows. It still works properly.

 

[db796]

if u are still having problems take a eraser to the connections from the laptop to the battery spots and freshin them up a bit evans comp had the same thing wrong with it he did it worked just fine onlything was that his stayed at 0% battery and had to be pluged in non-stop