Inspiron 8600 Troubleshooting (Battery?)

Hi all, not sure if this is the ideal place to post this but I'm looking more for help from past Inspiron owners and on dealing with Dell's support, gonna paste my post from the Dell community boards as well as a little update, anyone have ANY clue as to what's going on? Any help would be appreciated...

Here's an update from the above post... called Dell up again yesterday, told them about the second battery having the exact same problem as the first, support tech couldn't really give any more help (apart from e-mailing me some generic list of sites on laptop batteries), and told me I'd be called by one of his supervisors. Got a call a few hours later, gave him a rundown of the problem, and he told me the only thing left would be to try a complete cycle of the battery, decharge it completely, fully charge it and then see how long it lasts... Did that last night, left it to charge overnight, fired it up this morning, and got 80 mins of running.

Here's what's killing me: There's DEFINITELY something wrong here, but what? All the Dell Tech's i've talked to INSIST it's a battery issue (that's if they admit there's an issue at all, i've had some of them trying to convince me that the 90-120 min run time is normal, yeah, so a 50% drop in running time (with NO change in apps run, brightness etc.) and this warping that occurs everytime i hit ~30% is 'normal'? Don't think so).

Anyone ever seen anything like this, and have some advice on what to do? I have around 10 days of my 1 year complete care left (think this machine was ordered on Aug. 30 last year).

Thanks

 

i had virutally the same thing happen on a inspiron 8000, it turned out that the dc-dc converter board was faulty and i got that replaced, after that it been running fine, on two high capacity batterys, if your laptop is still under warranty, mention this to dell and they should repair/replace the laptop or the dc-dc board

alex
NCR-UK