Sorry for bringing up an old thread, but out of EVERYWHERE I could find on the web, this thread seems to be the go-to place for strange battery/charging problems on the 700z models. I have some to add, and some new questions as well.
I'll spare you the details of my struggles, but here's the quick rundown:
1.) Zero battery charging at all. Doesn't matter if I leave it off and plugged in, or on. It never charges.
2.) Charging light goes to orange as if it was charging, but after hours or days (no real pattern), begins alternating orange/green to indicate a charging problem.
3.) Windows (BatteryCat program) and Ubunutu both show a really low charge voltage (about 8v) with 0 watts, and zero rate of charge, even though it reports the battery is good, present and chargeable. Here's the specs as reported fro Ubuntu:
Code:
Device - battery_BAT1
Type - Laptop battery
Vendor - SAMSUNG Electronics
Supply - Yes
Refreshed - 7 seconds
Present - Yes
Rechargeable - Yes
State - Charging
Energy - 0.0 Wh
Energy when empty - 0.0 Wh
Energy when full - 71.0 Wh
Energy (design) - 80.2 Wh
Rate - 0.0 W
Voltage - 8.0 V
Time to full - 0 seconds
Time to empty - 0 seconds
Percentage - 0.0%
Capacity - 88.6%
Technology - Lithium Ion
What has been tried/tested:
1.) Plugged power adapter into various wall outlets, an UPS, and even a power conditioner.
2.) Two power adapters have been tried, one a generic 90w replacement, the other a modified Dell 120w adapter as mentioned previously in this thread.
3.) Two different batteries have been tried, the original one (registers as 88% usable), and one new-old-stock (registers as 98% usable), both genuine Samsung.
4.) The power jack on the mo-bo appears to in excellent condition, both physically, and the solder points. Multimeter shows 19.6v at one terminal, ground at the other two, plus ground for the 4 jack outer case mounts.
5.) Multimeter readings for the battery connector - The 4 red wires all test at 16.5v, a single blue wire tests at 3.3v, and 4 black wires test as ground.
6.) Voltage reading for the power jack and the battery connections remain consistent when powered off, and when powered on and under load (no voltage drop). Readings are also nearly identical between the 90w and 120w power adapter.
7.) BIOS is the latest release.
I'm to the point where I'm leaning toward a bad motherboard, specifically the charging circuit. What the motherboard reports (8V) is NOT what's actually going on (16.5V).
Other than trying a genuine Samsung power adapter as a last resort, it seems the motherboard is the most likely culprit.
Before I spend the money on trying a different motherboard, is there ANYTHING else I can try? Is anyone willing to probe their laptop with a multimeter while its' running to confirm the same voltage readings on a properly working model?
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
