“Dell Inspiron 1570 Laptop. Windows Vista basic.

I got a new charger for it and when I hover over the inspiron 1570 battery icon in the toolbar it says: 0% Available (plugged in, not charging)

Seeing as it’s charged 0% whenever it gets unplugged it automatically shuts down. Which is very annoying. ”

Solution:

“For about 6 months I’ve been getting the infamous “dell inspiron 1570 battery plugged in / not charging” icon in the system tray.

I also get a dell power supply not recognised message when I look in the BIOS page.

Battery health supposedly OK.

Sometimes it would charge, sometimes it wouldn’t

Things to try:

Tapping the Dell icon

Blowing into the adapter socket

Wriggling the power cable and twisting it to maintain some pressure on the jack.

Flicking between power plan options (balanced, high performance etc)

Removing and replacing the battery with the power on

Swapping the adapter

Replacing the power jack board

Slightly bending the centre pin of the power jack to ensure contact

Using the suspicious replacement dell laptop ac adapter on another Dell laptop

Flashing the bios to v A17 (via USB key and /forceit command)

Uninstalling the “ACPI-compliant control battery method” and then reinstalling.

I did everything on this list except update the BIOS and prelacing the power jack board. I couldn’t update the bios because my battery for dell inspiron 1570 was less than 10%, and the bios would only install on windows, not DOS. I tried booting to windows 98 CD, but that didn’t work either. That program will only run on Windows, so the /foreceit command is a no-go. Also, I looked at the bios version I had and read the version updates to the succeeding versions and I didn’t see any power modifications, so I figured that wouldn’t work. Also, since my laptop was going in and out, I figured it was an open rather than a software issue.

I was right! I took a few hours the other day and opened up the laptop and found the faulty connection at the signal wire connection to the AC jack.

so in two hours I had a working laptop again, which is good because Fry’s was going to charge me 160 bucks to fix it. Thats 80 bucks and hour, because it only took me two hours to fix.

“