700m composite battery driver not installing...hence system doesnt show battery

Question

I received my Inspiron 700m then the first thing i did after testing it out was wipe the harddrive and install windows xp pro with service pack 2. everything went fine , until i unplugged the ac cord to see how much battery power i had left , but it did not change to the battery icon, instead i had the 'On AC Power' icont still there..   So i went into device manager and checked it out. ACPI devices were all there...hmm... power management looked ok. But in the system devices part there was an unknown device with a red X on it. I enabled it and reboot. Then i went back into it and it showed unknown device without an X, so i looked into the properties and it said that the drivers were not installed. So i went through the wizard and it tried to install the driver for a ' Microsoft composite battery' and it failed at the end with the messahe that it could not install because the data was invalid.   I talked to dell support online and over the phone and the guy on the phone tells me that this is a known problem with no fix.   so then i think that's a crock because if that were the case they would not have been able to ship xp home or pro without a working battery meter.   I searched the forums here and on the web. but no working solution. one solution was to remove acpi items then have the system re-find them. i tried that but it didnt work. some people that that it was just hidden by the os , but it isnt hidden the system just doesnt switch to battery mode.   So then i tried to update the bios but the windows bios program requires at least 10% of the battery to be charged, but since windows cant see the status of the battery it doesnt seem to see the battery. hence it doesnt want to update the bios.   DOES ANYONE HAVE A FIX FOR THIS!!!???     thanks

Dilbatt · Answer

I have definitely never heard of this one before. Definitely not a known issue, or you would see this all over the forum board.

Two suggestions:

1) Wipe the drive and reinstall SP2 again.

2) You might try installing Windows XP SP1 and then upgrading to SP2.

Neither of these are great suggestions. Sorry.

arenared · Answer

Deifinitely worth a try, I had seen a similar problem before with a sony vaio grx-500 but it was never resolved. i hope this one does! OH and by the way , any news on the A01 update installer destroying 700m's?

accurate81 · Answer

just updated with the new 700m A01 Bios via windows and all went smoothly and the only thing that i can notice is a new boot-up screen. it now says "DELL INSPIRON 700m"

ps. the 700m has some weird power issues, it seems everyone on this board has had some sort of irregular behavior.

good luck

arenared · Answer

The xpsp1 install then the sp2 upgrade fixed my issue.   thanks to all and Dilbat.   I'm actually scared to update the bios...lol

Dilbatt · Answer

The Windows BIOS flash utility was updated and reposted.  You shouldn't have any issues.   The issues fixed states: - This version contains an improved / updated Windows Flash utility.

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