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

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