Notebook Battery daily maintenance FAQ

Notebook Battery daily maintenance FAQ

Note that these steps correspond with decision points on the flowchart and are reached directly by clicking on the diamond symbols. The text below cannot be read sequentially.

Needs AC Adapter to boot? The first step in troubleshooting your inspiron e1705 battery is determining whether it can hold enough charge to boot the notebook. Will the laptop power up and run on the battery, or does the AC adapter which doubles as the laptop battery charger need to be plugged in? Modern notebooks usually have a whole array of status LEDs that will tell you if the laptop senses good power coming from the battery charger and whether or not the battery is charging. Unfortunately, there's no universal standard for these LEDs, their colors or their actions. Note also that we're using the term "boot" rather loosely here. If the laptop powers up on battery, you can hear the fans and the drives, your troubleshooting problem lies elsewhere.

Life Of Battery Too Short? This is the main problem laptop owners complain about, and often for good cause. Older laptops using Ni-Cad and early Ni-MH inspiron 6400 batteries often ran for 2.5 to 3.5 hours when brand new, but within a month or so, would barely keep the notebook powered up for an hour. Newer laptops using Ni-MH and Li-ION batteries are much better, often holding onto a three hour life through hundreds of charge and discharge cycles. The first line of defense against complaints about battery life by the manufacturers is always, "Did you charge and operate the battery according to the manual?" Unfortunately, different laptop manufacturers seem to disagree over how to best treat batteries of the same technology, and I wouldn't be surprised if the differences extend to different models from the same manufacturer.

If the laptop's Dell D610 battery life has been slowly degrading over time, it's probably operating more or less in accordance with plan, but if you find the operating life shortened by more than 15% or 20% within the first few months, there's probably something wrong. Batteries of all technologies can be "trained" to perform poorly through non-ideal usage patterns, but the Li-ION battery technology is pretty resistant, and as long as you run them all the way down once a month or so, you can probably prevent any serious charging memory issues.

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