I’ve got a Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop. For more than a year it has served me faithfully with no problems. But now I’m facing a frustrating issue - the battery won’t charge. It’ll be plugged in, as it is now, and there will be a little battery icon at the lower right hand side in the taskbar, showing a battery filled halfway in with green, and a little picture of a plug next to it.
But when I mouse over it it says “46% available. Plugged in, not charging.”
Everything’s aces when it’s plugged in, and it usually is - but sometimes I need to move it around and I don’t want the battery to drain down. What can I do to make the damn thing charge properly again?
Look at the BIOS. Dell has an option in there to disable charging of the battery (as in, you plug it in and it runs off the adapter but won’t charge the battery.) I have no idea why they do this.
Dell has chronic battery issues. Both of our Dell laptop batteries died completely and on mine it simply will not charge a battery. I loved my Dells, but the battery issues are just inexcusable. To add insult to injury the plug routinely slips out of the side of the computer meaning that if you aren’t ultra careful your computer keeps turning off.
Sorry I can’t help, but I have nearly taken a baseball bat to mine.
I solved this problem on my Dell 1505 by replacing the power adapter. But 1) the warning message pretty much told me the power cord was the problem and 2) I knew the battery wasn’t that old, and unlikely to be failing (as opposed to the power adapters which fail regularly every year).
My wife had this issue and it required a replacement of the motherboard to fix it. I’m not sure if something was wrong with the “board” itself or if it was the AC jack and the tech would rather switch out a board than solder the jack back into working condition.
Despite the bad talk of Dells, their customer support was very helpful in my case – I bought the laptop used through a 3rd party as a refurb from a corporate lease and, with only a couple days left before its warranty would expire, rushed the process for me to establish “ownership” and got a tech out with a day to spare.