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Two week battle with a dead laptop battery, turned out to be firmware
Honestly, my Inspiron 15 from 2019 stopped charging out of nowhere. I swapped in a new $60 battery from Amazon, still nothing, then spent hours checking the charger and the DC jack with a multimeter. After 14 days of frustration, I found a Dell forum post about a BIOS update that fixes battery communication errors. Has anyone else had a firmware issue masquerade as a dead battery, or was it just my luck?
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vera_lewis8d ago
Did you ever think to check the BIOS before throwing money at it? I had the exact same thing happen on an old HP where the battery showed as "not detected" and I was ready to buy a replacement too. Turns out a BIOS update from like two years back had a fix for battery communication that I never installed because who reads those notes, right? The part that kills me is that these updates sit there for years and nobody tells you, so you waste two weeks chasing wires and chargers for nothing. Now I check for firmware updates first before I touch any hardware. Lesson learned the hard way, and it sounds like you learned it too.
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