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I recently purchased a Dell latitude D630 from an acquaintance. It came without a battery, but I bought one from Amazon to replace the missing one.

However, the battery refuses to charge. I cleaned the terminals after putting in and got no response at all. After cleaning and turning off and restarting, it appeared to charge briefly. But next time I checked on it, it was only draining, and every time since then hovering over battery icon says 5% plugged in not charging

I've tried a bunch of stuff so far:

  • Cleaning the terminals on the battery and laptop.
  • Removing the battery, rebooting, uninstalling the ACPI controller drivers and adapter drivers, shutting down, replacing the battery, and rebooting again. However, Windows just reinstalls the driver.
  • Updating battery drivers and adapter ACPI control drivers.
  • Changing out power adapter cords.

I'm stumped. I've done driver reinstalls multiple times. The only time battery light comes on is when powering up, and even then it only flickers a little. What could be causing this?

The laptop is running Windows 7. I believe it's the 64-bit edition.

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  • dell batteries and chargers come with embedded with chips that need to recognize each other, maybe one of them is genuine and the other is not ? My dell laptop shows the same message when I plugin an HP charger
    – Shekhar
    Commented Dec 12, 2013 at 15:39
  • Look in the BIOS, my Dell Laptop has a section that deals with the battery/charger and says if they are recognised or not.
    – Tog
    Commented Dec 12, 2013 at 16:11
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    ACPI drivers will not help. With a working battery (and non-broken motherboard and a good powerbrick) you should be able to charge the battery from the BIOS, long before any OS (or OS related drivers) are loaded. Either the new battery is a DOA, or something is wrong on the motherboard, or you have a problem with the PSU. (Note that this laptop refuses to charge if you use a non-Dell powerbrick or if the pin or chip needed to recognise the powerbrick as a Dell brick is damaged).
    – Hennes
    Commented Jul 7, 2015 at 11:00
  • You don't indicate whether the battery you bought was an OEM or third party. I've had many third party batteries DOA. So it could be as simple as that.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Jun 24, 2016 at 3:34

2 Answers 2

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All of the battery charging hardware is not really directly controlled by the operating system so things like driver or OS reinstalls won't bring a misbehaving battery back to life.

It sounds like your battery is dead or the controller in the battery has a problem, or has detected an issue with the battery and won't allow a charge. Batteries have built-in protection that can prevent charging if for example the temperature is too high or there is a voltage problem.

When I worked for a cell phone repair shop, we had a machine that could sometimes bring back apparently dead batteries. While this machine (a CADEX) was for cell phone batteries, models exist for laptop batteries. So if you know of a battery shop nearby, it's possible (but unlikely) they may be able to bring it back to life.

I would heed @A32167's advice though and try to get batteries only through reputable, warrantied sources.

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This a common problem. This us how I fixed mine. Boot up, once you're on main window page unplug power cord. Then plug it back in very quickly one motion..straight in hard. Keep doing that till you see battery is charging. These laptops start to have problems with charger. Remember press the charger in hard with on motion. Should work!

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