Good morning. I am new to the Dell Forums and hoping that there is someone out there who can help me with a problem I have run into with an Inspiron 600M laptop. I work with computers a lot, but am a lot better with the software and OS stuff as opposed to the hardware and BIOS stuff. Unfortunately, I think the problem I am running into is with the hardware.

 

I had my laptop running on the battery the other day and had to step away. It was a couple hours before I got back to it and saw the red light flashing on the battery icon. I knew the battery would have been dead by now, so I carried the laptop back and plugged it into the charger. After several hours of letting it charge, I took it off of AC power and tried to boot it up. This is where I ran into a problem.

 

It would not boot off of the battery. When I pushed the power button, the screen remained blank and just sat there. A couple of the lights flickered, but then went off. I tried to plug it back in to AC power and still had the same problem. I then tried removing the battery and found that it would boot up, on AC power,once the battery had been removed. Obviously, a laptop that won't run on batteries doesn't do me much good. At that point, I remembered that I had a second battery, which I had just charged a day or so ago. I did the self battery check by using the button on the back of the battery and it had 4/5 lights (all in a row, so about 80% charge). I put it back in and tried booting up, but no luck there either.

 

So, I have 1 dead battery that won't charge. I have 1 good battery that the laptop will not boot off of. And it will only boot if there is no battery connected. If I boot up on AC power and then try to put the battery in, everything completely locks up and my only option is a hard reboot. I cannot flush the BIOS because I can not even get into the BIOS with a battery plugged in and if I do, it locks up and I have to do a hard reboot.

 

Any assistance that anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

==Will Deem