I recently purchased a Dell latitude D630 from an acquaintance. It came without a battery, but I bought one from Amazon to replace the missing one.
However, the battery refuses to charge. I cleaned the terminals after putting in and got no response at all. After cleaning and turning off and restarting, it appeared to charge briefly. But next time I checked on it, it was only draining, and every time since then hovering over battery icon says 5% plugged in not charging
I've tried a bunch of stuff so far:
- Cleaning the terminals on the battery and laptop.
- Removing the battery, rebooting, uninstalling the ACPI controller drivers and adapter drivers, shutting down, replacing the battery, and rebooting again. However, Windows just reinstalls the driver.
- Updating battery drivers and adapter ACPI control drivers.
- Changing out power adapter cords.
I'm stumped. I've done driver reinstalls multiple times. The only time battery light comes on is when powering up, and even then it only flickers a little. What could be causing this?
The laptop is running Windows 7. I believe it's the 64-bit edition.
Best Answer
All of the battery charging hardware is not really directly controlled by the operating system so things like driver or OS reinstalls won't bring a misbehaving battery back to life.
It sounds like your battery is dead or the controller in the battery has a problem, or has detected an issue with the battery and won't allow a charge. Batteries have built-in protection that can prevent charging if for example the temperature is too high or there is a voltage problem.
When I worked for a cell phone repair shop, we had a machine that could sometimes bring back apparently dead batteries. While this machine (a CADEX) was for cell phone batteries, models exist for laptop batteries. So if you know of a battery shop nearby, it's possible (but unlikely) they may be able to bring it back to life.
I would heed @A32167's advice though and try to get batteries only through reputable, warrantied sources.