FLashing White and then Red on Front ! ???

I have an Inspiron. I haven't used it much. When I have used it it's always been plugged into the mains. Yesterday I came to use it and did the W7 32 bit updates and now the LED on the front flashes one white and four flashes red!
I tried unplugging the mains and the battery removed. But the same. I tried running it on the battery, the same. The battery monitor says the battery is 100% charged and is fine. The machine appears to run perfectly.
Booted it up a few times. Left it overnight. Just the same.
It was fine before I did the updates. What could have caused this ?
The book says flashing red indicates a device malfunction, but ut says nothing about alternate flashing white and red.
Any body any ideas. It's flashing is really annoying.....

 

Oh and another thing I just found out..... If I remove the battery and just run it on the power supply, the LED behaves itself.

 

Then it's probably just telling you that the battery is dying/dead. Or the controller chip is broken. How long does the machine actually last on battery?

 

Last night it did about two hours.

 

Yeah, so the battery controller probably thinks the battery's dead, even though it's not. I came across a D600 battery in a similar state some time back, but I never tried messing around with it... so I don't really know if there's anything you can do about it.

I doubt it, but do tell if you figure something out.

 

Is this battery controller thing inside the battery then ?

 

Yes (ten characters).

 

Don't quite understand what you meant by (ten characters) ????

 

The answer to your question is yes. The (ten characters) is filler because the board doesn't let people write posts with fewer than ten characters.

 

Oh OK. Thank you. I am taking it over to my 2 sons house on Sunday. They also have Inspirons. I will change batteries around on their machines and see what happens. That should tell me something, but I suspect you are right, it's the battery controller. Some people have been saying on the dell forums that running the laptop on mains with the battery in all the time isn't good for it. They say if you run on mains all the time, remove the battery. Is this right ?

 

Commander Wolf :-
I put my sons battery in mine and it was fine. I put my battery in his Inspiron and the red blinking light appeared. Got to be the battery controller as you suspected. PLease answer the Q posed above if you have a second..... then this might not happen to me again ?