The battery either doesn't work at all (laptop dies as soon as unplugged) or it sort of works (only holds up to a certain percentage of charge). It's been happening for over a month now and I've not noticed any pattern, it is seemingly random. Yesterday it was stuck at 71% charge and worked for a few minutes on battery power before shutting off. Today it's stuck at 2% charge and shuts off immediately when unplugged.
Windows says it's "(plugged in, charging)" though the percentage is static. In the BIOS it reports "Excellent" health and there are no messages in the shut-off event logs. The Dell Diagnostics program doesn't report any problems. HWMonitor says the "Wear Level" is 17% and "Charge Level" is 1%, although Windows says it is at 2% today.
I've tried updating the BIOS to 1.5.1 (from whatever the previous one was) and the issue still occurs. I've uninstalled the battery and AC adapter from device manager and that didn't help.
Another thing I've noticed is it shuts off when the GPU is stressed even when plugged in. CPU stressing doesn't cause any issues, but GPU stressing (benchmarking, intensive games, etc) cause it to shut off within seconds. I don't think it's a heating issue since the GPU only reaches ~80C when the shutoff happens. My theory is the GPU tries to draw power from the battery, which causes the crash.
Any help would be appreciated because my laptop is essentially useless. The obvious things to try are unplugging/replacing the battery, resetting CMOS and trying a different AC adapter. I plan to do those things as a last resort but right now I'm looking for other solutions that don't require disassembly since I don't have the time for it.
Windows says it's "(plugged in, charging)" though the percentage is static. In the BIOS it reports "Excellent" health and there are no messages in the shut-off event logs. The Dell Diagnostics program doesn't report any problems. HWMonitor says the "Wear Level" is 17% and "Charge Level" is 1%, although Windows says it is at 2% today.
I've tried updating the BIOS to 1.5.1 (from whatever the previous one was) and the issue still occurs. I've uninstalled the battery and AC adapter from device manager and that didn't help.
Another thing I've noticed is it shuts off when the GPU is stressed even when plugged in. CPU stressing doesn't cause any issues, but GPU stressing (benchmarking, intensive games, etc) cause it to shut off within seconds. I don't think it's a heating issue since the GPU only reaches ~80C when the shutoff happens. My theory is the GPU tries to draw power from the battery, which causes the crash.
Any help would be appreciated because my laptop is essentially useless. The obvious things to try are unplugging/replacing the battery, resetting CMOS and trying a different AC adapter. I plan to do those things as a last resort but right now I'm looking for other solutions that don't require disassembly since I don't have the time for it.
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