Alienware 17 - Battery or MoBo At fault ? Very Urgent

Hi guys,

Guess this year is the worst for me, A huge personal issue happened, etcetera and first 980M problem and now this new hardcore mess.

First, day before yesterday I noticed this GFX card problem and that day I believe the battery connector gave a small light spark on the first (left to right) 3-5 port on mobo / battery cable couldn't exactly figure where as it's just for an ms and a pop sound, Laptop was working fine and now I just noticed the battery was charging always and checked the AW OSD's desktop mode and It was ON, So i fired up Aida64 and checked then the battery status is always charging instead of AC Line.

Now just opened again to reseat the battery cable and found the same type of spark and same issue, continuous charging but I don't smell any burnt electronics there, Now unplugged it to be safe.

Please help me with this multitude of issues with my beloved notebook. I took utmost care. Always did a powerdrain before working, after battery removal.

Attached pictures of the cable and mobo connector.

Please help, Should I get a new battery and plug it in ? & I don't want Dell to service on this machine as I've heard many horror stories and It;s out of warranty as well.

https://imgur.com/a/WAuCD

EDIT:

Ordered the Battery pack from Dell and took chances.

And no idea anyone ?

 

That's odd. Not sure what the deal is. I posted in your GPU problem thread as well. There is a chance the two issues might be related. Hard to say.

 

Apologies ! forgot to mention long back, first maybe in 2013-14 I had my battery not charge and stopping at 90% had to remove the cable and reseat (though the cable was tight in position) that fixed the issue, If the battery is issue then okay but still I'm spectical about if the mobo's pin goes wrong imo with electronics if things start to fail they die fully but the battery is being detected and so is the PSU, Only of the mobo is faulty it's so painful to me. I'm afraid to test that with removal of GPU now...Should I give a shot when the new battery arrives or any thoughts ?

+rep Thank you very much mr. fox I was checking all day for someone knowledgeable to post here, Something is better than nothing.

 

If you have a 60Hz screen you should be able to remove the GPU and boot from Intel HD Graphics. Hard to say for sure what is going on, but that might help you narrow things down. It might just be a messed up battery also. I really don't care for how the 17 and 18 have a battery that plugs in with a wire harness. It seems fragile the way it is made. That's not a very good design compared to the normal way of having the slide-together contacts.

 

you mean like the one on the echo model's motherboard that burned due to excessive power draw?

 

yes

 

It has never been proven it was due to excessive powerdraw, also very unlikely because than pretty much all would burn down. Someone just had a faulty cable. Always those assumptions on this forum.

It wasnt even the battery cable by the way but the DC in cable.

 

I hope the mobo is fine, I also expect a full burn out in case of the mobo failure, Is there any type of debug check that I can do with software on Mobo ?

 

Update :Good news !!
@Mr. Fox I installed a new battery with 2% wear from Dell and Checked AIDA64 the Power is from AC Line, and now the battery says fully charged not charging like the old experience. I think It was a bad battery !

 

Sweet! Glad it was so simple.

 

OK bumping this thread - As of September 26 / 2016, New issue surfaced unfortunately.

Desktop mode always plugged in and stays at 100% says "fully charged". For a few mins I unplug the PSU and it drops to xx% says charging, reaches to 100% says the same, this had happened before also on this new Battery 2% wear by default from Dell.

Now the Issue comes, I want to get that DT mode back ON, So I make the machine run on battery for 2hrs+ or so and make it go down and then restart and found a wear level increase by 4% making it total 6% happen in an effing restart this happened a month ago Edit: I thought a callibration issue but nope. Now today It happened again and upon restarting the machine it jumped to a 10% wtf is this 4% increase on every full discharge cycle, same report on HWinfo, Aida64, Battery care & the ultimate confusion is this - The machine was running even when the battery was at low 0% for a damn 5-10 mins with AlienFX ON !! And then I restarted it by removing the OSD and then there comes this message critical battery level press F1 for continue or F2 for setup and tried multi times and finally the laptop couldn't post that message just switches on and then turns off.

I can't ask Dell for replacement since iirc the return policy of parts from dell hold the return for 30 days right ? And the new battery was fairly over 30 days.


Is the machine at fault or the battery ? Or the PSU, never overheated or anything like sounds or smoke, Tried even plugging the PSU only w/o battery and works well, bought from Dell for higher price for the 980M upgrade. Open to suggestions. Thank you.

P.S
This is very sad for me as this laptop was a remembrance to a person who was dear to me and not anymore in this world, Happened this year only.

EDIT 2 : So from reading over I learnt that all these new modern laptop batteries if undergone full discharge cycles they wear a lot quickly ? So I guess I have to stop over thinking this or ?

 

Update - follow up to the above post.

About the battery, I learnt a few things & let me share these tips.

First keep in desktop mode, yeah it charges everytime we unplug it to 100% and stays there for quite a time and then stop charging, I've seen the Aida64 and the charge rate goes down all the way from 7000 to 0 slowly then it goes to "fully charged" state. This is normal and thus the Desktop mode kicks in making the battery stop delivering the power act as an Auxillary source when powercut happens, thanks to BIOS as it doesn't draw power from battery at all when you are running in PEG mode. Doesn't mean iGPU/SG mode does that we are good.

Second - Wear level. This is very important, I've learnt the hard way, Never ever discharge the battery from 100% to 0%, Only discharge it to 40-50% max if you do that, the wear Increases on these Li-Ion batteries. That's how they are designed, About my case yeah it does this by 4% for every cycle. So be careful.

So that's it key things are - Don't discharge and never keep the battery % less than 40% as they tend to die fast and loose their power/ability to charge if you keep then unplugged also they like to stay in high powered states always (shelving - 60-70% state is recommended), Order a battery soon as they might go out if stock the Original OEM Simplo ones are still available at less 2%-5% wear.