[goducks3620]

The laptop isn't recognizing it and refuses to charge. Sigh. I contacted customer service and am awaiting a reply. They sell on ebay as well as Amazon and I see some positive comments from buyers, so it must be BIOS dependent. I just don't know which one.

[tastewar]

Sorry to hear the OOS news and about your subsequent troubles. Keep trying! What BIOS are you running?

[goducks3620]

BIOS1. This was bought with Ubuntu, and Dell doesn't seem to push BIOS upgrades out to non-Windows machines. I didn't even know there were new BIOS until I found this forum. I downloaded the BIOS USB-key-based updater but couldn't install it on a machine at home since we don't run Windows. I installed the utility on a key here at work this am and will try it with a newer BIOS tonight.

In the meantime customer service contacted me and told me it should run with any BIOS, and asked me which version of Windows I was running. Waiting to here back but I am not optimistic. They have offered to send a new battery or refund this one, but this is so obviously a software issue that I want to see if I can fix it first.

[goducks3620]

upgraded to BIOS4 and the battery is working! I'll watch it for a few weeks but thumbs up so far.

[lswartz]

That is great news.

[isp23]

Glad I found this thread, I have a similar issue. My battery died when my SSD was down. Thanks for replies.

[Emilio84]

You say you were able to update the bios. Did you did this with the replacement battery or the "dead battery" you had originally? If it was with the new battery my assumption is that it came partially charged and that allowed you to update your bios. If that's the case, did you try the old battery to see if it would charge?

[goducks3620]

I did it with the new battery and of course plugged it in while updating. Yes, it still charges the old battery, which can't hold more than thirty minutes of juice or so anymore. Need to recycle that thing.