mikefitzvw Posted January 28, 2011 Share Posted January 28, 2011 Hello everyone, I have an Inspiron 8100 that was given to me by my aunt. I am having issues with battery charging that I think are related to the BIOS. It is a new battery (not new-old-stock) and was working fine for a month, but just stopped charging properly. Originally the system had an older BIOS and the new battery wouldn't charge. I upgraded to A15 (the latest BIOS) and it began to charge fine (slowly, but it definitely worked). Everything was fine until last night when I unplugged it for a few minutes under Windows 7 Home Premium trial (I run XP on an 80GB drive but was fooling around with a spare 20GB HDD and Win7 - yes it DOES work, very well in fact). When I unplugged it, it went from 100% battery life to 7% and went to hibernate in about 15 minutes. Because this is a new battery that very recently worked for about 2 hours, I'm wondering if the BIOS somehow got confused. I thought it might be Windows 7, but under XP it is still doing the same thing. I think it might be fully charged, but XP automatically hibernates when it reaches about "4%" to prevent data loss. To troubleshoot, I want to try using an older BIOS.My problem is 1) how to downgrade the BIOS in the first place - I do have the floppy drive and spare disks if they're needed2) do you think there will be any problems with more recent hardware if I downgrade, either back to the old BIOS (whatever it was) or whatever I can find. It currently has an 80GB HDD and 512MB RAM. One of the BIOS's on Dell's site said that it fixed issues with 256MB ram (didn't say whether MORE was bad, or just 256 specifically). I also just installed a PCMCIA card to get 2 USB 2.0 portsThe charger was recalled, and I had it replaced 2 weeks ago for free (Dell still has some integrity apparently). I have tried putting the battery into each bay, seeing what the charge was in the BIOS (the problem manifests even within the BIOS, it will go from 100 to 7% when unplugged). Thank you all for any help. I'd rather not buy a new battery if I don't have to (especially if, perhaps, the laptop is killing the batteries prematurely for whatever reason)-Michael Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tripredacus Posted January 31, 2011 Share Posted January 31, 2011 Well first you need to be able to acquire an older BIOS. Then you need to determine what type of BIOS it is. You should be able to tell by going into your notebook's BIOS. If it is an AMI (American Megatrends) you can do a BIOS recovery but its a pain and I never got it to work properly. I believe that Award is another BIOS manufacturer. Find out which kind it is and then it should be easier to determine how to do a recovery on it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted January 31, 2011 Share Posted January 31, 2011 Wait a minute.It is possible that the problem has NOTHING to do with the BIOS.It may well be connected to the SMART (? ) battery itself (I like to call these DUMB batteries). http://www.technologyquestions.com/technology/mobile-pc-hardware/37706-dell-inspiron-8100-battery-not-charging.htmlUnfortunately this other possibility goes through a Commercial Software (+DIY hardware):http://sbworkshop.com/http://be2works.com/jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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