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As the title says, I want to bypass the adapter detection, because it disables the battery charging, and slows down the CPU (I have killed this with ThrottleStop).

The charger is working fine under full load, just the 3rd identification wire is broken somewhere, so the laptop can't detect it, and won't charge battery. I have never seen a such useless "feature", and there are no options to disable it. Tried to edit embedded controller with RW-Everything, didn't help. The following happens when I plug in the adapter, and charges for some seconds, then disables:

  • Byte 0x07 changes to 20, then E0 when it disables

  • Byte 0x3B changes to 30, then 31

Changing byte 0x06 sometimes brings up the QuickSet application's unknown adapter warning, for example at 01, 03, 09.

So maybe DSDT editing helps, but I don't know, how to do it. Is there any way to force the laptop to charge the battery?

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  • 1
    “Useless” feature? It’s important that the laptop knows what size power adapter is plugged in so it can charge and power the system optimally. Being that you can buy generic adapters for under $10 and genuine adapters for under $30, it seems there is little need to do what you are asking.
    – Appleoddity
    Commented May 21, 2018 at 13:49
  • 7
    I had many laptops, none of them disabled functions, even with no-name adapters. But Dell does, it kills the battery because it's drained to 0%, still no option to charge. I have genuine PA-12 Family (928G4) adapter, so why i'm forced to buy a new when this is working? Because Dell implented this feature... So i want to use my laptop without useless limitations.
    – UDPSend
    Commented May 21, 2018 at 13:57
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    It's even worse than described -- We've have a bunch of Dells and random power supplies scattered through our company over the years. The worst is when it randomly won't detect a known good supply, as described above. I've got an Alienware, requiring the 190 Watt, and I'd love to be able to put it into "Limp Mode" and charge it slowly with ANY Dell adapter!
    – DaaBoss
    Commented May 21, 2018 at 14:32
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    @Dagelf I have solved the problem with disassembling the adapter, removing the identification chip from it, and directly soldering it inside the laptop, between idetification wire and GND. This site helped me: laptop-junction.com/toast/content/… If you fried the detection circuit inside the laptop I doubt this will work.
    – UDPSend
    Commented Feb 26, 2019 at 13:40
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    @Appleoddity It's not a feature at all. Any device can detect if the present power supply is sufficient or not by only monitoring the voltage (which is 19V in our case). If the voltage drops more than %5 or any preset limit, the device may stop using the power supply. This is only a bad decision in order to make more profit from the spare parts.
    – ceremcem
    Commented Jan 18, 2020 at 0:36

1 Answer 1

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The center pin of the barrel jack (coax) power adapter is the PS_ID pin. This pin must be present and is used by the logic board controller (EC = 8051 microcontroller) to communicate with the power adapter using the single-wire interface (Maxim / Dallas Semiconductor).

Respectively, from this single-wire protocol, the details of the power adapter are extracted by the logic board. Only then can the logic board know if the power adapter is able to charge the battery pack. If not, the logic board will be throttled and battery charging will be disabled.

While the Dell schematics show a crowbar circuit that should remove a high voltage transient from going downstream to the logic board, sometimes the mosfet that is acting like the protection switch gets damaged. If this mosfet gets damaged, the power adapter (although is ok) will not be detected. More details on the badcaps.net laptop forum.

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