XPS M1330 battery charge timing?

Hi All,

My first post here, please be gentle.

We bought an XPS M1330 in '08, after a few months the display needed replacing - which was done with minimum fuss while we were traveling OS in '08, a big tick to Dell for that!

Recently it has developed the 8400 nvidia fault. The warrantly was for two years, with a extention of one extra year on the GPU, which was fortunate as that would expire in a week.

Anyway - the motherboard was replaced by Dell with a refurbished one today, and i have noticed that the battery seems to be taking an eternity to charge. I am sure that previously the battery charging was fairly brisk, perhaps a little over 2 hours for a full charge from 10% full with no load. Our XPS has taken 2 hours (while idling) to do a 30% charge, if i were using the laptop i imagine it would take even longer to charge..

Please somebody tell me i am not going insane, how long does it take to charge your XPS? we are running the larger 9 cell battery pack. Im sure it has been a seemless process in the past, i think it was only a couple of hours to charge from next to nothing, this was 21% at about 4pm and will not be charged fully until at least 9PM - which is glacially slow.

The motherboard and daughterboard were replaced as a set, the power pack is still the original, the batteries are the orginals - which were in excellent condition. I have my suspicions about the actual charging circuitry in the refurbished motherboard.

I would really love to know exactly what 'refurbishing' Dell do to these motherboards. Our original had very light use, comparitively my ancient 8600 Inspiron has had a complete flogging and is still going strong - so it doesnt look good for the longevity of the 1330.. The cynic in me can see somebody else wondering why their refurbished XPS motherboard is losing all its graphics when it warms up

We love the look of this laptop, and when it is going it is a great unit, but i am losing my confidence in its long term reliability.

 

One more question!
I thought the battery icon in the system tray remained animated throughout the charging process. Ours shows the power plug when its is plugged in (which is good!) however the animation in the battery icon only works for 2 or 3 seconds then it becomes static, is that normal? I cannot recall for certain.. perhaps this uncertainty is refurb paranoia.

 

As a matter of comparison, i have just pushed my Inspiron 8600 down to 10% battery charge and it is now rapidly recharging at just under 1% per minute so should complete a full charge well inside 2 hours - which then gives it around 2.5 hours of average laptop usage.

I think the XPS may have inherited a power problem. Can anybody confirm what there approximate recharge time is?

 

Surely there must be one person out there with a 1330 that has some idea how long their battery takes to charge?

 

A three year old battery is on the verge of dying. None of my 9 cells ever lasted more than a year. What I think is that your battery has lost a large part of it's capacity, and the OS does not recognize it, and is trying to charge it.
Check the battery health screen in the BIOS setup, for more details.

 

Thanks for your input but - No, this has nothing to do with the operating system. It is not a faulty battery or external power supply, it was fine until the GPU failed. As a matter of fact the OS is not even required for the battery to charge, have you never left your laptop plugged in with the laptop turned off to charge it? The charging process takes place regardless, if the OS is running it will report on it - it will not reduce or increase the charging rate. it is merely an on-board charging cct that controls the state of charge, and steps the input voltage down accordingly, there is probably a minimal amount of firmware in the chip controlling that process.

What I was asking is how long other owners have noticed it takes to fully charge their 9 cell battery.

btw - My motherboard has been replaced again by Dell and the problem is now resolved, the battery is charging twice as quickly as it was with the original replacement motherboard.

 

I meant that the OS cannot recognize that the battery has lost its capacity. Of course the OS doesn't charge the battery.. It only reads the ACPI info.

At any rate, a 9 cell that has served you for so long is a miracle. I have gone through 5 of them in the period I have owned this laptop. When I did have it, it took around an hour and a half to charge with the laptop off.

I guess your problem was mobo related, after all..
Could've been a faulty connector, or a dud track somewhere.

 

Its a fair point that LI batteries will not last forever, though their lifespan, like most batteries, is measured in charge/discharge cycles. So with light use a battery has a better chance of a longer lifetime than heavy use, provided it is not allowed to discharge too far, and is not overcharged or overheated.

In our case i expect the battery will probably last at least another 6-12 months, but sudden changes that coincide with swapping of hardware are a good indicator of where to look for the root cause. In our situation the battery charged fine one morning, then two days later after a motherboard switch to resolve a GPU failure it didn't.

You must be a heavy user to need so many battery replacements, we use desktop machines and another laptop most of the time - this XPS machine was really for travel use only. Actually the other laptop - an 8600 - is still on its two original battery packs 7 years after purchase - yes they have a reduced discharge time but they are still servicable.