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Question

Battery meter can't see battery in xp

Jan 1, 2013 4:40AM PST

I'm running windows xp. My battery meter shows no battery present. I've tried the microsoft articles on getting it to display, but to no avail.
Details: Dell inspiron 6000 Laptop from about 2007.
window xp home edition version 5.1 (build 2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.12081-1629:service pack 3)
Dell has 15 pages of admin packs to download for xp users i have no idea what's needed.
Any ideas help would be greatly appreciated.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
I've seen that.
Jan 1, 2013 4:45AM PST

Installing XP is going to be daunting for many. There are no less than 150 patches, drivers and apps to install on a fresh install so my question is going to be. Why not use Dell's supplied OS and Driver CD to avoid all the work?

It's not like you're going to find a step by step for this today unless you pay Dell to support this.

If you used the supplied OS and Driver CD then that gets you a working machine then you can let Windows Update install the 100+ patches over the next day.

-> DO NOT USE WINDOWS UPDATE FOR DRIVERS.

You have a great question. But after a decade you would have expected some progress on installing Windows XP but it appears to have stalled or worse.
Bob

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Answer
The other issue.
Jan 1, 2013 4:58AM PST

If the battery is over 2 years old we know not to expect it to work. Batteries are 300 cycle affairs in most laptops so if the user used it daily on battery power then about 18 months it's game over.

This unit also has the new circuitry to lock out non-make batteries and once in a while you run into a laptop with a non-maker battery that can never be detected. It also won't charge.
Bob

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How long do these batteries last?
Jan 1, 2013 6:31AM PST

thanks for the reply. Actually I thought the battery was pretty much gone especially after all this time since 2007. But I changed the setting to never shut off and it still lasts about an hour or more! before it shut down after 5 minutes. So if you are reading this and have an old battery don't give up on it before checking power settings. maybe your meter will work.

Its an original Dell Lithium ion battery that came with the computer, but i doubt it had much use. The reason i want to fix the battery meter issue is after an hour or so on battery i get no warning and everything shuts down real fast. I have my browser set to never remember anything so if i didn't bookmark the site or save or finish dowloading a pdf or whatever, i loose everything i'm doing and have to start over. no big deal but quite annoying. I figure its best to surf this way to avoid having to continuiously clear out all the temp files etc (which i still have to do).

From the previous reply, I am hearing my only option is to re-install winows xp?

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Keep in mind the old battery fire days.
Jan 1, 2013 6:38AM PST

If there is an issue with the bios/os identifying the battery all this can happen. Good it lasted that long but the age is working against us and the acid test is the fresh install.

I'm sure you and a million other folks are wondering why MSFT and the makers never issued a way to repair this OS easily.

My advice is to treat it like a fresh OS install. Install the drivers in the order mandated by the maker and hope it clears it up. This OS is not damage proof and after too many thousand repair installs and more, I have to weigh the time to try the repairs to a fresh install.

At the shop we can sniff out hardware issues faster. One shop trick is to pop in a spare drive to do a quick install and see if it works. Other times just a boot of a Linux CD tells us if it's the OS or the hardware.

But without fail, all laptop owners don't want it to be the battery or motherboard.
Bob