I have an old Dell Latitude C600 that I suspect has a faulty battery. The laptop has been sitting unused for a year now and last night I turned it on, formtatted it and reinstalled the OS and office etc. All was working fine. This morning though it will not boot. Its on AC power but the battery light flashes once so I don't think its charging it. If I press the power button every half second then it does boot but only as far as the 'dell' bios screen and then it hangs.

Is this a faulty battery? I know some laptops require a working battery to work at all but is the C600 one of them? I don't really want to spend £40-£80 on a battery to discover its not the problem.

I swapped the battery for that of a Dell Inspiron of similar age (this battery also dead by the way) and the Inspiron boots with the Latitude battery but not the other way around. Maybe the Inspiron doesn't need a good battery to function?

Any thoughts on what the issue can be? I was going to give this laptop away to someone today but I don't want them getting something thats going to break or be unreliable.

Every laptop I've come across will boot happily without a battery installed (under mains power obviously!), so if it's not booting, then I'd say it buggered, or at least it's not the battery you need to worry about.

I once had a laptop (actually, I still have it) where the battery was so bad that it would boot fine without the battery installed but wouldn't boot if the battery was slotted in.

Tried with and without battery with same results. Hmmm now when it does boot I get a BSOD with memory failure messages. Could this have been dropped I wonder?

On a related note:

Never, ever, allow a LiON battery (notebook, PDA, cellphone, iPOD, digicam, etc..) to run down completely to zero. It ruins the battery.

So when storing an unused notebook for long periods of time, REMOVE the fully-charged battery for separate storage. I periodically recharge my idle devices here to keep them from killing the batteries.

Cheers

I thought I'd fixed this last night! After leaving it plugged into the wall all day I tried booting it and it started first time but reported a memory address error. I swapped the memory module and it booted right up no probs - it was flying along. I shut it down and started it back up 5 times and it was perfect. I turned it off and packed it away. This morning I'm back to square one though! It boots to the bios loading screen and hangs and now won't power on at all. I'm going to leave it plugged in all day and see if it boots in 8 hours or so. If it does then I'm still at a loss as to what the problem is. Anyone see this behaviour before?

Well, you may simply have had two independent problems; bad battery and bad memory.