[0wen101]

For the record my mini 9 wouldnt charge, new batteries different Bios's etc. The machine said it was charging but nothing going into the battery. This is was on xp. The motherboard was the problem which dell replaced. No more problems.

My solution is get onto dell support pronto, your machine might still be under warranty.

[tuchubby]

my warranty went out long before this ever occurred....

does anyone have any solution yet?? i will not replace anything blind-foldedly and need to know what else i can do

[nollie]

Forgot to update you all, but Dell was VERY cheeky with this and the problem still is not fixed.

I called, and yes they were very polite and helpful. They sent an AC power adapter which as I thought did not fix the problem and also told me that in order to fix the problem I would need to extend the warranty for £34.99 to cover another year. 2 days after I forked out £34.99 I was told it must be a battery issue, not covered by the warranty I purchased and would have to pay an additional £80 for a battery. As the system cost a total of £270 I think is is an absolute scam, particularly as it appears from everyone else here to be a motherboard problem - WHICH IS COVERED BY THE FUDGING WARRANTY (Rage +1).

The problem isn't all that annoying so I'm just going to stick with it and never buy a Dell product again.

[tuchubby]

it turns out my warranty expires in 10 days
they're going to replace my mobo AND battery
time to reward myself with a runcore and extended battery

[T-Keith]

How'd you get them to do that? They are supposedly only replacing my motherboard and charger. I got the call yesterday that it shipped, so I should get it back right as the warranty expires.

[T-Keith]

I got my Mini9 back today. They did nothing with the computer at all, or the AC adapter. They "tested" it and sent me a new battery.(I have to send the old one back) Originally they told me they would replace the motherboard and AC adapter.

When I sent it in I removed the SSD and put the screws back in, big mistake. They sent it back without the screws so now I have no way of testing it. After a hour on the phone they are now sending me the screws and a new AC adapter. When talking to the tech support it became obvious that they did not understand the problem. They thought it was not charging at all.

So I will likely now have to send it back again, the warranty expires in 4 days so there will likely be a problem with that. I think I'm with nollie, this will likely be my one and only DELL computer.

[tuchubby]

Originally Posted by T-Keith

I got my Mini9 back today. They did nothing with the computer at all, or the AC adapter. They "tested" it and sent me a new battery.(I have to send the old one back) Originally they told me they would replace the motherboard and AC adapter.

When I sent it in I removed the SSD and put the screws back in, big mistake. They sent it back without the screws so now I have no way of testing it. After a hour on the phone they are now sending me the screws and a new AC adapter. When talking to the tech support it became obvious that they did not understand the problem. They thought it was not charging at all.

So I will likely now have to send it back again, the warranty expires in 4 days so there will likely be a problem with that. I think I'm with nollie, this will likely be my one and only DELL computer.

wow i did the same exact thing that you did. left the screws in the netbook when i removed my ssd. i hope they were smart enough to put it back in.

you also removed your battery? that was a bad idea.

also i sent it a few days before my warranty expired (i should be receiving it tomorrow). so hopefully they replaced the whole motherboard and not just the battery. i chatted with tech support and clearly stated that my battery would discharge right after it's at 100% capacity while still plugged in so i hope they understood the issue.

[T-Keith]

I did not remove the battery. They shipped my mini back without doing anything, except losing the screws, and separately shipped me a new battery. I also explained the problem via chat, but I don't know if the people testing it understood.

To be fair, I have not seen any problems yet, but the problem was intermittent.

[tuchubby]

i got my mini back and the results read: "we were not able to replicate your problem"

totally furious, i turned on the mini and did my own testing once again and now it stays charged! unbelievable. i dont know what caused it to go back to normal, but the only thing i did was remove my ssd (yes the screws disappeared), and now it works like normal. im thinking maybe users who are having this problem might want to do the same... remove the ssd and leave it out for 2 or 3 days to see if you can reproduce the same result i did. dell didnt do anything to my mini and its all fine now. i was very surprised to see that windows now reports how much time i have remaining, something that did not show up in the past.

[schwank]

So it appears I have been bitten by this bug too. About a month ago my machine decides to stop taking a charge. A friend brought over his charger and plugged it in, and sure enough the light came on. So Dell sent me a new charger.

However now I am experiencing something similar to what many of you are. The laptop seems to take a bit of a charge, and will now at least boot into Ubuntu. However once booted, the machine will no longer continue to charge. The battery meter will stay at whatever level it was at when booted. If I unplug it the icon switches to battery power and when plugged back in the screen gets brighter and the charging icon is displayed again. But the charge level never goes up.

I am on BIOS A04 still and never updated to A05. I do run Ubuntu 9.04 but based on this thread the OS certainly doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. We run Dell's here at my office but based on personal experience I would not buy or recommend another of these machines to anyone else. I know several friends with minis and every single one has been back to Dell at least once in the first 6 months. And I get the biggest pain cause I bought mine with Ubuntu and the support is completely separate from Windows support, even on the same hardware. THAT is truly lame. So, now I get to call them back again, and send it back for a mobo replacement.