« Steffan Soule - Fantastic magician in Seattle | Main | What? No bond measures? »

October 25, 2005

Trash your laptop with a battery...

What a lousy experience. I spent today at a customer doing network upgrades all over: XP/SP2 installs, loading all the latest patches, spyware scans, etc. The works.

I spent a lot of time on the boss's laptop, and to top it off ran a FlashBIOS update on his Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop. Dell has a great system to flash the BIOS from Windows, so there's no need to boot from a floppy drive (which this machine doesn't have). I do this all the time.

After rebooting, the system reported that it was indeed running the A15 firmware (instead of A12), but the keyboard was unresponsive — both the laptop itself and an external keyboard — and the "booting in <N> seconds" message took 5 minutes to count 30 seconds.

This was hosed long before the hard drive was involved, so it smelled like a bad FlashBIOS update, but it all ran properly. I was left with the sinking feeling of being the guy who had his hands on the system all day, updating this and that, but "I didn't break it". It's a lousy feeling.

I took it all home with the intention of trying to find a way to flash an older update, or at least copy the boss's date from the hard drive, when it all started working. Huh?

It turns out that the problem was a bad battery. This is a four-year-old machine, and both batteries have no juice left. The owner uses it in a docking station at home or at the office, and had no reason to replace these dead batteries (he didn't have any idea they were dead).

What I assume happened is that one of the batteries has failed beyond full drainage, and that it's always been bad. The A12»A15 BIOS update treats the battery differently, and this is what hung the system. I have a different Dell laptop which uses the same batteries, and it was just luck that I tried shuffling them around: one battery hangs the system in realtime, every time, whether in the BIOS or in Windows. Removing the devil battery un-hangs the system six seconds later, every time.

Everybody who's worked hands-on with lots of customer equipment has had the experience of things breaking, and the implication that it was our doing. Sometimes it is our doing, but when working on troubled equipment, we get the attention when things go wrong.

It's nice to have iron-clad proof that it's not our doing.

Posted by steve at October 25, 2005 09:42 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.unixwiz.net/mt/trackback/53

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Trash your laptop with a battery...:

» Solution for jagged images on a Dell widescreen laptop from Burning Hate
Some of the Dell widescreen laptops seem to have a problem rendering images. They all come out very jagged and poorly rendered, as if you took a very small image and zoomed in on it until it was huge. As usual, don’t blame me if this breaks you... [Read More]

Tracked on November 23, 2005 09:36 PM

Comments

I have definitely had this problem now twice on my Inspiron 8100. It's very annoying that a dead battery hangs the laptop and can bring the system to its knees!

Posted by: Mark Moore at November 29, 2005 08:51 PM