Solved! Dell inspiron 600m won't charge

[mkristof]

hi all

long time viewer of this site, first time to forums.

i've got a dell inspiron 600m computer, secondhand from my brother. hard-drive crashed when he had it, so i replaced it and reinstalled windows xp professional.

since i've reinstalled the software, the computer doesn't recognize the ac adaptor as the unit will not charge. i have troubleshooted by trying another battery and another power source, both to no avail. bios showed that it was charging fine until i rebooted everything.

now, when i reinstalled windows i used my own personal copy, not the one that dell give you with all the necessary drivers. thus, i had to go to dell.com to obtain all the drivers i needed. is there such thing as a ac adaptor driver?

i know it's probably some really easy fix or something. i've scoured the internet and found problems linked to battery, ac adapter, motherboard...so i am at a loss here.

any help is much appreciated. thank you.

 

[buwish]

I don't believe that there is a driver for the AC adapter. Any laptop that I have reformatted and used a retail version of Windows, they have all function just fine in regard to power and charging. My guess is that the internal PSU is shot or the AC adapter is bad. You'll probably have to spend some cash on a new AC adapter.

 

[mkristof]

the problem is i tried three different adaptors and it didnt work

 

[Toolkitguy]

It's easy to check the power adapter if you have a DC Volt meter.
If you know the batteries are good and the AC adapter is good, it is probably the dc jack on the motherboard that is bad. You need a lot of patience as this means
the laptop has to be completely disassembled. Have a multi compartment tray handy and drop labeled pieces of paper in them indicating where the removed screws go. It's about a 4 hour job if you do it right. You can get the jack on ebay.
Good Luck.

 

[madmanpierre]

Has any come across a solution to this? My family has a couple Inspiron 9400's and Inspiron 1525's. We recently rebuilt them all (by putting in new hard drives and installing new copies of Windows 7 on them). ALL of them now have the problem above - they won't charge, yet ALL of them worked before.

One of them was done remotely (in another city) so it wasn't a power spike that killed them all, it was doing a new installation.

Also, on one, if we put the old HD in and boot with it - magically it charges no problem.

So if anyone knows how I messed up by installing from scratch I'd really appreciate to know the trick.

Thank you.