DW's laptop DEAD DEAD DEAD then alive?

[joebedford]

Yesterday her machine was totally unresponsive first thing in the morning. It was plugged in - I checked the power brick and it was putting out 20V (spec'd at 19.75V) so it wasn't that. I pulled the battery and tried the system w/o a battery. Put the battery back in - nothing. Pulled out wifi and mouse dongles - nothing. Did the reset procedure recommended by Dell - nothing. I figured it was dead Jim.

I left it for 3 hours and went out. When I came back the machine resumed her previous session as if nothing had happened. What the ...?

I've run full diagnostics and everything passes. I've done extra backups just in case.

The only thing I can guess is that even though the laptop was plugged in, maybe it wasn't charging and the battery went very dead. Maybe all the wiggling and plugging and unplugging of the power brick started it charging but there wasn't enough juice to run the machine until the battery came up a bit.

It's fine now but we're wondering if we should bite the bullet and buy a new one now. It would be more convenient for us to wait until we're home at the end of April.

I know what you're going to say though: it's a 7 year-old Latitude 1545 - replace it now. She likes the look of the Dell Inspiron 7000 with 6th gen i5 processor.

Any thoughts on why it was dead then alive? Hey, maybe it was because I updated it to Windows 10 a week ago. W10 is being blamed for everything else so why not this too? 🙂

[Thunder_Mountai]

I would keep it until it really dies. Just make sure to have good backups.

[pconroy328]

joebedford wrote:
It was plugged in - I checked the power brick and it was putting out 20V (spec'd at 19.75V) so it wasn't that. I pulled the battery and tried the system w/o a battery. Put the battery back in - nothing.

One small tidbit - I've owned a lot of laptops over the years. One thing I like about the Lenovo Thinkpads is that there's no wait time to power up once plugged it.

I can power them up immediately. I had a few other laptops that needed the battery to recharge a bit before they'd power on.

[pianotuna]

Tiger Direct is selling some nice Lenovo Win 7 with free update to win 10 machines. I'd certainly have a look at them.

[Chuck_thehammer]

possible bad connection.. battery to motherboard... so was not fully charged... and low voltage because of bad connection...

removing battery and reinstalling with brick hooked up.. computer booted up.

best guess.

[horton333]

I have seen this on an update and on BIOS flashing, but not with the battery out for an extended period of time and then restarting where it left off. I am baffled how that can be.

[Irover]

My old 2005 Dell 12" notebook did that just yesterday on a restart. Screen went black but the idiot light stayed on. I left it set and 15 minutes later it resumed reading that it had updated. And i have Windows/7 Update set to manual updates! It is working ok again.

[joebedford]

horton333 wrote:
How long did you remove the battery from the system for?

Per the Dell reset procedure, I pulled the battery and held the power button for 10 seconds. I guess the battery was out for about 30 seconds.

[horton333]

How long did you remove the battery from the system for?

[2oldman]

I've had intermittent problems with a replacement battery on my little Samsung netbook. Contacts aren't 'contacting' the way they should, so I use needle-nose pliers to bend them until they do.