Dell XPS M1530 Battery charging – bios downgrade to A09 can help

I took delivery of a Dell XPS M1530 laptop on 31 January 2008. Very pleased with it – ran OpenSolaris almost straight out of the box (sole exception being the Marvell Yukon ethernet, now supported by yge). Things went reasonably well until the SAGE-AU conference last year, when I noticed that the charging function wasn’t. Totally unchargable.

The battery and AC adapter, it turns out, were under a 1 year warranty, not 2 years like the rest of the system. Got a new 3rd party battery (from laptopbattery.net.au) and a new Dell AC adapter, and the battery lasted until about a fortnight ago.

Got another 3rd party battery, this time somewhat cheaper via a Melbourne-based EBay.com.au store. It arrived 60% charged, and seemed to charge up ok when I plugged it all in. Yay, I thought, problem solved.

Not so. As it happens, my laptop’s charging circuit inside the case (not the AC adapter) appears to be unable to recognise any sort of AC adapter, so I get the dreaded “AC Adapter – Unknown device installed” message in the bios, and under bios version A12, NO CHARGING TAKES PLACE WHATSOEVER.

None.

Rotating the power plug in the socket doesn’t help either, even though it’s a genuine Dell AC adapter.

A bunch of searching this evening turned up this thread, which said that it was worth trying to downgrade the bios to version A09, and perhaps run the bios flash program with “/forceit” as an option.

This is about the only reason that I keep the Vista partition hanging around. Though sadly, when you run the 1530_A09.exe program (even with /forceit and /forcetype) in Vista, with the battery at less than 10%, you get an error message telling you to charge the battery to at least 10% before trying again. Very frustrating!

Fortunately, one of the posters in that thread had a link to a Win98 rescue cd image which contains the bios flasher… pulled it down, burned it, booted it, flashed the bios (it’s on the logical D: drive) and now I’m sitting here watching the laptop bios battery screen increment the charge status every few minutes.

The AC Adapter is still “unknown” – but at least I’m getting charge in. And I don’t have to go out and buy a new laptop (at least, not just yet).

This is the sort of thing which really annoys the heck out of me. Not only is there no opportunity for me to get the bios flashed from OpenSolaris using fwflash but there’s clearly some “enhancement” in A12 which is actually a regression and serious functional misfeature compared to A09. Let’s not start on the hardware problems in the AC adapter, either.