Laptop battery

[chamber]

@admins:- feel free to move this to a better location if you want to.

I have a dell inspiron 1200 that I inherited, it's quite old but had a RAM upgrade and runs crunchbang great so I love it.

Anyway ever since I got it the battery has been flashing a critical failure and the BIOS doesn't recognise that one is installed.

I was wondering if a new battery would be recognised or is it a deeper problem, the batteries that I've found aren't cheap and I don't want to waste my money if it won't solve it.

I'm not desperate to get this solved as I am quite happy using it plugged in for now but would like to know out of curiosity sake.

[HermanAB]

If it is that old, the battery likely needs to be replaced. Note that there are many shops that can cut a battery pack open and replace the cells, then super glue it back together again. Have a look in your home town yellow pages. This may be much cheaper than buying a new pack from Dell.

Cheers,

Herman

[chamber]

Thanks for that,

I'll have to have a check around and see, took it into one computer shop to see if they had a spare one that I could check with and they told me that it was a problem with some sort of firmware and that a new battery wouldn't do any good.

[tom66]

You could also do it yourself, but take the appropriate safety precautions. Open the pack and see what cells are in there, then find equivalent or greater (capacity) cells and remove the old ones by desoldering them then solder the new ones in. You can usually get cells on eBay. Remember not to short them out, or they'll explode. Don't puncture them ... or they'll explode. Don't burn or heat them... (you get the point, lithium cells are volatile.) And dispose of them properly.

[chamber]

You could also do it yourself, but take the appropriate safety precautions. Open the pack and see what cells are in there, then find equivalent or greater (capacity) cells and remove the old ones by desoldering them then solder the new ones in. You can usually get cells on eBay. Remember not to short them out, or they'll explode. Don't puncture them ... or they'll explode. Don't burn or heat them... (you get the point, lithium cells are volatile.) And dispose of them properly.

Lets call this "plan B"!

Would be pretty fun to try, although I would probably wreck the thing.