Dell Latitude C600 Battery

I work in a high school and we have many Dell C600's that we use on mobile laptop carts for the students. The problem is many of the batteries are not working correctly. They are either not charging or say they are charged, but do not supply power. When I worked for gateway they had a utility in the BIOS on many of their laptops to recondition the battery. It would basically discharge the battery and then test while charging to see if the batter was OK. I was wondering if anyone knew of a utility to test and recondition batterys on Dell notebooks or any other notebook for that matter. I searched Dell's Website and I googled, but no luck. Any help or insight is appreciated.
Thanks ahead of time.

have you read this?

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Originally Posted by NooNoo

have you read this?

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Yes I have read through that and it is not very helpful to my situation. It is most likely that these batteries are bad, but I have seen similar problems with batteries that were fixed when they were reconditioned. I just want to do everything I can before I say for sure these batteries are bad. I have here about 15 - 20 computers with batter problems and these batteries are not cheap. Thanks for looking NooNoo.

Time for the lightbulb trick...

Get a low voltage bulb, solder a wire on each terminal. tape the wires to the battery terminals... let the battery run till the light goes out. Charge the battery, repeat discharge with lightbulb and then do that 2 or 3 times more

Or email/call dell and ask them?

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Originally Posted by NooNoo

Time for the lightbulb trick...

Get a low voltage bulb, solder a wire on each terminal. tape the wires to the battery terminals... let the battery run till the light goes out. Charge the battery, repeat discharge with lightbulb and then do that 2 or 3 times more

Or email/call dell and ask them?

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Wouldnt that lightbulb trick take a long time to discharge that battery. and I did email dell this morning, but they take long to respond and they are usually not very helpful.

of course... but it is both cheap and effective, and what else are you gonna do while waiting for dell to get back to you?

I think this passage from that document says a lot:

There is no battery memory effect with a lithium ion battery—you can charge the battery whenever you like without fear of reducing its charge capacity, and you do not need to drain a lithium ion battery completely before recharging it.

It aslso metions a life of around 400 charge/discharge cycles. The original C600 range started with 500mhz cpu's and ending with 1ghz with all speeds in between.

Some of these batteries could being nearing 3 years old. I've seen batts fail after 12 months

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Originally Posted by tommo6666

I think this passage from that document says a lot:

There is no battery memory effect with a lithium ion battery—you can charge the battery whenever you like without fear of reducing its charge capacity, and you do not need to drain a lithium ion battery completely before recharging it.

It aslso metions a life of around 400 charge/discharge cycles. The original C600 range started with 500mhz cpu's and ending with 1ghz with all speeds in between.

Some of these batteries could being nearing 3 years old. I've seen batts fail after 12 months

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Tommo is right I have seen many batteries failing as of late on a deployment we did a litle over a year ago. Of couse we did Compaq Evo's, not Dell's. We bought about 1600 laptops and as of December began replacing at least two a week.

Compaq also informed us recently that even though we bought the Mac Daddy of service plans that after 1 year the batterys are no longer covered. Seems a little fishy to me.


EC

We deployed approximately 1300 Compaq Evo's and we're currently replacing about 5 laptops a week. We were also told that the batteries only have a 1 year warranty, after the fact. I believe the replacement battery cost is about $150ea!

Oh yeah, hard drives are starting to fail quite often now and they've only been in the field about 18 months.

Dell class the battery as a peripheral/accessory and only give a 12 month warranty. It is not covered under the on-site warranty.

If your C600 is reporting a battery as only charged to xx%, try the battery in another system and see if it charges fully. or if the batt fails to charge on the system but charges in another sys.

This could be an indication of voltage circuitry failure on the motherboard.

I have changed a few boards for this type of failure.