My Dell Latitude D600 battery light is blinking green once than three times orange. Pushing the test button on the battery, it blinks 3 times with 3 test lights coming on (every other one), then quits blinking. Battery is supposed to be new. It takes about 5 hours to charge it but only runs about one hour - with PC more or less idle - What is going on? And is the rumor true, that Dell only lets you charge your battery approx. 300 times and then it goes 'haywire' from one day to the other and you need a new one? This happened to me from one day to the other. Used LT on battery, plugged it in during the night, next morning the problem started. The Laptop works fine with the second battery I have. A 2 hour charge gives me 150 min+ of runtime. The second battery test button brings on all 5 test lights when fully charged.
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Thanks for your fast reply; Just funny it seem to recover. Now it is charged in 2 hours and works for up to 90 Minutes. I keep fooling around with it a day or two and will constantly keep draining and charging it, just to see what will happen. There are even moments know, when the laptop does not blink orange anymore... weird thing, guess we both think it's broke. I keep this question posted for a while. Could be someone else makes similar experiences.
Tx again
Thanks Rid and Nobus, but Dell D 600 does not offer a calibrate option. Seems I just got a lemon of a battery that doesn't work not correctly. I checked the link, nobus, but it seems a few things like the calibrating are different in a Dell compared to a HP LT. Anyway, thanks for your help. I will keep die question open for some more days. May be something comes up.
I messed with a "bad" battery at one time by locating the battery output terminals and hooking up a lamp of suitable voltage. I had it connected like that, until it started dimming seriously and then put it back in the laptop and recharged it. That sort of reset the battery and/or its measuring circuitry. The problam may be to locate the proper terminals; there are several contacts that are for other purposes on the battery. Only 2 are needed: + and - from the cell pack. With a suitable voltmeter they can be found.
/RID
Helped insofar as the battery came up to near-normal capacity for a while, and the on-screen meter seemed to show reasonable values for time left. The unit (and the battery) was old even then (like 5 yrs), though, so it became more or less useless in a couple of months anyway. Perhaps not worth the while if you are intending to keep the laptop and need to use it away from AC power. A new battery may be the wise way out of this.
/RID
You can check the battery status on Dell laptops in BIOS settings.Press F2 during start up and navigate on the right to battery status and battery info(not sure of the exact words).One of them shows how much the battery is charged and the other one if the battery is performing normaly.)If the battery is malfunctioning,you will see a message like:This battery has experienced a permanent failure and needs to be replaced,or:This battery is performing normaly if everything is ok.Also on the menu that shows how much the battery is charged,make sure that the percentage is increasing.If the battery is full,you will see: Idle,100% charged,if it is below 100% you will see something like charging,58%.If it is malfunctioning,you will see:58%,discharging or idle.You can also use dell diagnostics to test the battery.Press f12 during start up,choose dell diagnostics and then perform tests on the battery
Try to reseat the battery,a bad connection might cause that.
Thanks everybody.
After doing some final tests - trying out your recommendations - I have come to the conclusion, that one of the battery cells is defective (0.6Volt) , three others are fine (2.95 Volts) . Readings with the volt meter confirmed Rid's first answer clearly. I therefore close this post. Thanks again for all the input. UWS
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by: ridPosted on 2007-09-12 at 23:51:01ID: 19882012
Seems battery is bad. These things happen. Perhaps you can file a complaint if the battery is new enough.
/RID