Power indicator light not showing when using replacement battery

[mosherben]

Hi,
I have a old Dell D400 laptop, and finally the battery was running low (20 minutes max on a full charge). So, I bought a charge off ebay which arrived today. I've put the new battery in, and unlike my old battery, the power indicator light does not light up (usually flashes orange/yellowish green) when receiving power.

When I put in the old battery, the power indicator light works.

Is this a cause for concern for my laptop?

Cheers,

[watercooled]

Does it actually work? If so, all Li-ion battery packs have some form of protection circuitry to prevent overcharging/over-discharging/etc and some have I/O connections to 'talk' to the rest of the PC. I'm not certain obviously as I don't know how yours is wired but these I/O connections might not be wired on the battery pack. Not necessarily a problem if it works but it could imply poor quality/cost-cutting/poor or missing components/etc.

[peterb]

Probably not a concern for your laptop, but possibly a concern about the battery you bought off E bay. Was it a UK supplier?

It might be worth leaving it plugged in to charge for a while and see if it will power the laptop on its own. Or if there is no charge at all, it may be taking so much initial charge current that the poweer light doesn't come on (but may do later)

But these are long shots. As Watercooled says, the charging and monitoring ccts are buiklt into the battery pack to ensure optimum (and safe) charging conditions.

If it came from a UK supplier, I'd return it. If it came from an overseas supplier (Far East) you could try returning it, but I wouldn't hold my breath for a replacement.

If you paid by Paypal, you may have some form of redress that way, but you will need to follow the disputes procedure to the letter.

[mosherben]

Well the battery works, meaning that I can turn it on and it can get used. It just seems to be not charging.

What was interesting, was that the BIOS said the battery status was Idle when I have the mains cable plugged in.

I've done some googling, and some suggest a BIOS update is in order for it to work but I'm not sure. I got revision A07 and the latest out there is A08. I'll have to wait until Monday when a new hard drive arrives (80GB isn't enough for dual boot windows and Ubuntu). I've tried doing BIOS update in Ubuntu using instructions on how to use apt-get but it can only pull out A07 (which I already have) even through I found A08 update for Windows on Dell's site.

It's abit complicated as the battery was actually a birthday present from my gf, so I just told her what I needed but will have a proper look at it tomorrow. Hopefully post some pictures to compare the 2 batteries using my phone, to rule out the point that watercooled made about "talking" to the rest of the laptop.