Garrett’s Computer Problem
Nephew Garrett brought his Dell Inspiron 1521 laptop here last week. He says it won’t charge anymore. It works fine with the AC cord connected; it just doesn’t charge.
Since it’s a laptop, I won’t take it apart — too many small pieces to keep track of. Hopefully it’s the battery itself that’s bad, and not the power board inside the computer proper.
I’ll put my observations and resolution (if I find one) in the comments below.
November 15th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
07:00 PM: I fired up this computer. It took an unusually long time (more than two minutes) to boot up into Windows Vista. But once the desktop appeared, I hovered the mouse over the battery icon and it reported a 12-pecent charge. So I’m letting it charge a while longer and will see if that number goes up. Stand by.
09:20 PM: I just tried to check battery status and the computer locked up when I touched the mouse to turn off the screen saver and display the desk top once again. I rebooted. Not a good sign though. I’d say he probably has some software on the computer that’s hogging resources.
09:32 PM: Well, after ten minutes, I finally could read the battery level indicator; It says 87%. So the computer at least, thinks that the battery is in fact charging. Indeed, the power supply is quite warm to the touch, and so is the battery. Once it’s fully charged, I’ll unplug the AC power and see how long it runs before depleting the battery.
I’m going to recommend that we completely reformat Garrett’s machine; it has some “bloatware” that he probably does not need.
11:20 PM: The computer reports that the battery is fully charged. Tomorrow, I’ll run the laptop on battery power and see how long it lasts. This will be the acid test of how effectively the battery charges.
November 16th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
03:30 PM: Garrett stopped by a little while ago.
03:45 PM: I’ve determined today that the battery does indeed charge; though it doesn’t last but an hour per charge. Garrett explained that he keeps the machine set on “high performance” mode, which drains the battery considerably faster than the other, more conservative performance settings. Still though, it did charge, which likely rules out the charger and the internal electronics in the computer as possible problems. Also, we were unable to duplicate the message he received one time, telling him that the battery could not be charged.
04:15 PM: My suggestion: Reformat the drive and install only the programs he actually uses. The programs on there right now keep the CPU at around 60% busy, and occupy the hard drive almost constantly. So he’s got something screwy on that computer. Reformatting will clear all of that.
04:30 PM: We went through all his installed programs and he indicated which ones he wanted and which I should not install after the reformat. I encouraged him not to reinstall the Dell tools as well as the Verizon security suite since he indicated that he began having problems after installing Verizon software. However, his family pays for a subscription for this. So he’ll probably end up installing it again. I recommended the Avast anti-virus software instead because in my experience, it works well and its resource footprint seems quite small; I’ve experienced very little performance degradation with Avast. But we’ll see what program he wishes to use.
November 17th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
07:15 PM: Reinstalled the Windows Vista operating system. Checking out the results now…
07:25 PM: Vista is downloading and installing the latest updates currently. This could take some time to finish. Stand by.
11:20 PM: About 49 of the 96 outstanding updates have installed at this point. The rest should complete overnight; I’ll just leave the laptop running.
November 18th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Garrett called this afternoon, wondering over when his compute would be finished. I told him that I’ve reinstalled Windows but that I want to test it a bit more. So I asked him to check back tomorrow. It should be finished then.
November 19th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
02:15 PM: Testing complete. All appears well.
03:30 PM: Garrett stopped by to pick up his machine. He checked it our and was very pleased with how much better it’s performing now, thanking me profusely.
For payment, Garrett owes me three trips to Altoona, the first of which we’ll do this coming Sunday, when we pick up [Emmy] at the train station.
November 22nd, 2009 at 3:00 pm
06:00 PM: Garret paid me back the first of the agreed-upon three trips to Altoona today, when he drove me to the train station to pick up [Emmy]. We also went on a small-to-medium shopping trip as well.
December 13th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
11:00 PM: Garrett paid me back the second of the agreed-upon three trips to Altoona today, when he drove me to pick up [Emmy] at the train station. As we did the last time, we went on a shopping trip today as well.
May 3rd, 2010 at 7:40 am
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