926. Dell Battery Saga

I first bought my Dell Inspiron 1440 in 2010. Yeah, it's old and this year became my wife's PC. It is so old Windows 10 was not yet supported and never did get supported, But, it has been running Windows 10 since it came out. That's the positive news for those with this old model from Dell.

Since day 1 this PC had a problem in that periodically I would notice, not exactly frequently, that the Power Icon was reporting that the battery was NOT charging and it's capacity was less than 100%. I NEVER used it on battery then. The fix, or circumvention was to simply unplug it a plug it back in and it started charging again. I got tired of constantly monitoring this around 2017 and removed the battery entirely. All went well until now when y wife wanted to use it in a warmer room (ha-ha). Thus, we decided to use it on battery and charge occasionally like everything else these days. Thus, comes the problem below:

Although it was charge to 100%, it discharged to about 67% then plummeted in a minute or less to 4%! Whoa...bad battery symptom. Tried again charging it and it progressed with charging until about last expected time of 1 hr and 27 minutes left and at around 71 % when it jumped right to 100%. Okay, let's run on it now. Same problem as before. Ran for about 10 minutes before 4% again when critical action shut the PC down. I ordered a new battery.

New battery came at about 65% charge. I drained it (battery used) until it got to 2% as recommended, but its discharge and recharge took on the same behavior as before on the old battery. I found a lot of information on the internet about other possible reasons and actually tried some without any change. Then decided to discharge again and recharge. This time it gradually went down, I kept changing the Power settings to capture the LOW, Reserve, and Critical conditions. It discharged correctly. I reset Power Settings to normal settings and recharged. This time it gradually did its job correctly. I can only conclude as I read on some articles that this discharge/charge cycle should be done about 5 times to condition the battery correctly. I believe the problem is fixed now. I wonder if old battery is really bad though or if I need to do the 5 times thing with it too since I had it stored in a drawer? For the $14.28 it cost me for the new one, I just keep the old one around in a drawer again and try later if I ever need to. Sure is nice now to use as a laptop again. Wife like me more too.