laptop battery blinking orange constantly

Hi,

(vostro 1500) I have read the other posts regarding this. And I'm pretty sure that my 6 cell battery is dead! But I wanted to still get everyone's opinions about my situation. I bought this laptop in december 2007. Its battery, untill the sudden moment when it died, was going strong. And by strong I mean that it was giving me more than 2 hours of battery life untill just one day before it died. I went out to my office and left the laptop plugged to the ac adaptor and some download was going on, the current power profile had the sleep functionality set to "never" in the battery as well as power mode. I came back after ~7 hours and see this orange light is blinking constantly. I turned the laptop off and checked the battery status and it showed the 5 green lights. I turned the laptop on again and still the same orange light. I detached the battery from my laptop and saw and pressed that little status button on it and no green light showed, infact no lights at all. Everything has been dead on the battery ever since. Now if the battery is plugged-in, the orange light keeps on blinking and the OS shows that no battery is plugged, and if the battery is detached than of course no light is there.
How on earth can a battery just die like this? I have read that a lot of people get a message from the OS telling them that the life of battery is decreasing and I have never ever got that message. Btw, my warranty was just a limited 1 year so thats expired now.

thanks for the replies!

 

There's a reason why the standard battery warranty is only one year.

Some batteries die gracefully and others die suddenly. The problem is often with the way the battery calibration is managed. Instead of the full capacity being reduced, the empty point effectively rises (think of a water tank filling with sediment).

One test for Dell batteries is to keep holding down the power gauge button. The first reading is for the remaining charge but after a few seconds it changes to the amount of wear.

John