Given that the docking station draws a certain amount of power, I was told that you couldnt really use the power supply that came with the laptop through the docking station as you are then giving the laptop less than the required wattage. So does that mean that when on the docking station it is purely running via the attached power supply? Initially i would have thought that it would just revert to the battery to make up the difference but you would then have a slower charge to the battery itself?

i was told by dell that on a precision laptop that has an adaptor that is 180w you would need an adaptor for the docking station that is around 210w to makeup the difference... hence you couldnt just plug in your 180w adaptor to the docking station... reason being is the original adaptor for the docking station was only 130w.

they also mentioned that running under the required power could result in data corruption and also affect the battery.

when originally running with the 130w adaptor it came up with a warning that said the laptop would need to shape its resources... so it must be drawing on the power directly.