17 R1, critical battery trigger met when new battery is full and plugged in

Question

I have a 2013 Alienware 17 R1 laptop. Recently, I had to replace its motherboard, and it created a windows product key problem. To solve it, I opted to do a clean install of w10 but you cant do that with a dead battery so I had to replace its deceased battery as well. I bought a new original battery, installed it and installed a clean copy of w10 on the same day.

Now, ever since I did this I've been having random shutdowns. Well, to be more exact, these are random shift to hibernation, as I'm able to resume the computer without losing what I was doing. I looked at the event log and found this event:

Critical Battery Trigger Met
Followed by this:

The system is entering sleep.

Sleep Reason: Battery

But this happens while the battery is fully charged and the comp is plugged in! The battery itself works well, holds charge and everything, and this shouldn't even be triggered when the laptop is plugged in, so I'm at a loss. Does anyone have any suggestions of how to solve this? It's really disruptive and interrupts my workflow.

Thank you!

ejn63 · Answer

First thing to check for: is the system losing the connection at the DC jack? If the center pin isn't making good contact, the connection could be intermittent (which means it's either a plug or jack issue). That would be tripping the system onto battery.

Second thing: is this an OEM Dell battery, or something aftermarket?

koriva · Answer

Thank you for your reply!Well, since I have a spare charger, I tried changing the charger and the problem persists. So its not the charger end. It still may be the charging socket itself but I dont know how to check that...As for the Battery, a far as I know its OEM. I bought it as one, from a physical store in my vicinity that sells batteries and parts and not off the internet because I needed it asap. All the external markings on it match this claim and it seems legit, so I believe it is....I did have a non-original one before that, the one that eventually died (I had three in total since I bought the laptop in 2013)

crimsom · Answer

Hi @koriva  you might have a new main battery with a misbehaving cell. Look to see if the Win10 Battery Report says something about battery health, etc.

crimsom · Answer

Hi @koriva guess the Event Viewer is saying: Event 524, Critical Battery Trigger Met, followed by Event 42,The system is entering sleep. Please open command as admin and run the following:

powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_BATTERY BATACTIONCRIT 0

After Restart, this command will set the Critical Battery Action for On battery to Do nothing. The Do nothing option should be available in the GUI dropdown for Plugged in. Hopefully this Win10 fault will have been fixed.

ejn63 · Answer

If the problem persists, replace the DC jack. https://www.parts-people.com/index.php?action=item&id=19354

koriva · Answer

@crimsom Thank you for your reply!I did end up disabling the 'go to sleep' option on critical battery in the power plan. It gave me a much needed peace of mind, however I kept the 'your battery is low' notices on becaue I am trying to monitor when this happens and what the battery capacity is at the time. I tried to run a battery report, but it doesnt really show anything unusual that I can see. I'll try to run as usual for the next 3 days and mark the battery notices, then run a battery report again and see what the correnation is.

A51-06 · Answer

You dont have to keep checking using windows,

Just boot into F12 boot options and click the EPSA diagnostics and then when the test fully runs you'll see the results in the results tab and also has the configuration tab which can show your battery health and cycles left!

Hope this helps @koriva

Alienware

17 R1, critical battery trigger met when new battery is full and plugged in

Was this post helpful?