Dell Studio Battery Problem

Are these forums moderated at all?

I hae been researching this battery not charging problem here (I have it too, obviously) and I find several posts inquiring about the problem, but no soutions.

Dell might do well by having a representative post an answer to this, don't you think?

We, your customers, would greatly appreciate a response from your tech team on this one.  The reason being that the troubleshooting options, including paying for a tech support call, and/or buying a new adapter and/or battery for troubleshooting tests are prohibitively expensive.

Dell, you can see the customer above was pretty thorough and did his tech diligence, but still no solution

Please Dell, help us out here. We'd really appreciate it.

Thanks,

Reid

You would think that they would be intrested in helping us solve our problems but look at it from their point of view. If you have to call them to get this resolved they can sell you out of warrenty possibly a motherboard, a power supply and a battery not to methion the call to their service desk. All this can easily lead to more than the cost of a new laptop and major profits to them.

Now from my own research I thought I read that the power cable has 3 wires, a positive and a negitive 19 Volts and a data line? I suspect that this data line from the power supply to the laptop is the source of our problems. I suspect that if the laptop is not able to communicate to the power supply it will not not charge. I suspect that this data line is breaking and we're losing communication to the supply. I suspect that what they are communicating between the supply and the computer is the amount of power currently being used and the amount that is available to the charging circut.  Unforunatly the software that likely manages this does not tell you that there is a communications problem to the supply and therefor charging is turned off.

Now if this is true dell could update their software so that we are informed of this issue and we don't all run out and buy new batteries only to find out that this does not resolve our problems. They could tell us that the problem is with the supply and direct us to buy/repair the correct part. This would be good business on their part because if we do purchase the battery only to find out that it is the power adapter many of us might get upset that they should have told us what the real issue was.    

I know this thread is old but the third wire is probably the earth or ground wire. Basically it is a second return or negative wire so you don't get zapped if there is some kind of electrical fault with the laptop.