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May 9th, 2011 06:00
Inspiron e1705 with Windows XP
I reformatted this four year old laptop and for the most part, it is working fine. I have just two issues left to resolve. The first is in the device manager. There are three question marks/exclamation marks under the heading of unknown device. I can only guess that these were three printers that my son managed to break one at a time at college. I only guess that because I read something in the device manager about plug and play. Everthing else is the device manager is good. There is no need to load a printer by a USB cable since I loaded my hp wireless printer. It worked well now that I installed Adobe flasher player 10. So my question there is how do I get rid of those question marks? The other issue is with the battery. I think this is the second or third battery for this laptop. I seem to recall that right before the end of the three year warranty Bantech replaced the mother board because of the battery issue. In the system tray, it says plugged in, charging, zero remaining. The laptop works if I remove the battery and just use the cord. The Dell quick set says that battery health is good and it is charging. It is a Dell battery. My only thought is that there is a broken wire somewhere that is preventing the battery from charging. As this is a four year old laptop, I don't want to spend $150 on a battery to be proved correct. Another son has the identical laptop so my only thought is to switch the batteries out and see what happens. Of course, that means son two's battery needs to be healthy. I also thought about flashing the BIOS so I did download that driver, but the laptop refuses to do it unless the battery has at least a 10% charge. Any suggestions about either of these two issues would be appreciated. By the way, I consider this to be an accomplishment that I a 58 year old grandma managed to do this reformat while none of my sons was willing to tackle such a job. Maybe they didn't think it was worth the time but at least my grandkids have a computer to use when they visit. Thanks,
lindapolovchik
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258 Posts
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May 9th, 2011 19:00
I figured out the unknown device error in the device manager. I didn't realize that there are two chipset drivers for the laptop. I think I downloaded the Ricoh drivers but forgot to click on them to unzip and install. I'm still trying to figure out the battery issue. I found in another post that I could go into the BIOS to see if it was set up to give me an error if there is a problem with the AC adapter. That was enabled so I have ruled that out too. I'm going to switch out the battery with another this weekend that has a full charge so that I can flash the BIOS and see if that helps.
lindapolovchik
2 Intern
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258 Posts
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May 13th, 2011 05:00
I can only guess at this point tht I need a new battery for this laptop. I switched out batteries with another E1705. The other battery had a full charge so I flashed the BIOS to A10. After it rebooted I ran on battery until I was at 93%, hooked up the power adapter and it charged back to 100% pretty quickly. My battery was placed in another E1705 and it appeared to be charging meaning the battery light was on and the system tray said it was charging. We then shut down that laptop to let it charge. When that battery was placed back in my E1705 the charge was still at 0%. The battery that takes a charge def says Dell battery and the one that doesn't take a charge did not. Thats the $75 difference. Oh well.