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September 7th, 2006 20:00
blink codes for battery light
does anybody know the meaning of the blink codes on the battery light? I have a problem where that light blinks a rapid four flashes of yellow/orange, followed by a slightly longer green blink, and then repeats infinitely. The longer I let this go on, the more CPU cycles it seems to take to do whatever those lights mean, until the machine bogs down and cannot be used. If I remove the battery, the lights stop and the machine can be used normally (if attached to AC power). The above symptoms are with my original battery, which seems to be stone cold dead, and the power meter application reads it as "not present" even when it is there and blinking the lights like mad.
I bought a new battery, and it arrived with about 29% of charge in it, and the computer will not charge it any further. the power meter reads this new battery, I can run the computer without AC power with this new battery installed, but it will not charge it, and the battery lights never come on in any color with this battery installed. The power meter does see this new battery, knows its name and seems to report reasonable values for its state of charge, but it will not charge it up any further.....it's steadily declining.
I'm beginning to wonder if there was not anything wrong with my old battery, but instead something wrong with the charging circuitry in my laptop.....which is a Dell Inspiron 8600. On advice of the battery supplier, I updated my system BIOS from A06 to A14, the latest BIOS available on the Dell web site. The new BIOS works fine but did not change the battery symptoms at all.
If anybody knows anything about this I would appreciate hearing your story.
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spottedblue
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December 8th, 2006 14:00
mine was doing the same thing. the second tech i talked to at dell said "it means it's not charging properly." not necessarily "not charging at all", just "not properly", so maybe not charging at full capacity. could be a (partially) bad battery, (partially) bad ac adapter, or something wrong with the circuitry. i was getting 3amber-1green flashing sequence on one of my dell-purchased ac adapters and 4amber-1green sequence on my other dell-purchased ac adapter.
in my case, it turns out that my modular battery wasn't seated properly: i unseated it and reinserted and life is good. too bad i got through 3 dell people and noone had the foresight to suggest that to me.
greenly,
marcus