Spoke to soon....PSU Failure....Already.

Well it looks like I spoke too soon with mostly positive comments about the new M18x R2, I believe I have a PSU failure as I am getting the following message upon boot up:

The AC power adapter wattage and type cannot be determined.

The battery will not charge.

The system will adjust the performance to match the power available.

Please connect a Dell 240W AC adapter or greater for the best system performance.

Press F1 to start....

I have tried unplugging the PSU from the wall, rebooting, plugging it back into different outlets to no avail.

Ideas.

 

It certainly appears you may have a bad AC adapter, but you can get one sent overnight.

If you ignore the message and load Windows are you continuing to see an issue? I once had a bad AC adapter that I was able to continue using for a couple of days while waiting for a replacement, and other than the error message everything worked OK. It possibly has a bad chip that identifies it as a proper AC adapter.

 

Mr. Fox, thank you for the quick reply, yes I can get into windows but the games are running at about a quarter of the usual framerate. Contacted Dell, I have to do some troubleshooting first, I am quite certain it is a PSU problem.

 

Intermittency! After running to my car to retrieve my cell phone to work with at technician I returned and plugged into different outlet and now no warning?!

Hmmmm.

Very bizarre.

What should I do? I already terminated the call with the Dell Technician. Going to test some games, will report back.

 

I doubt that it healed itself. It may be just a coincidence that removing it from any outlet would cause the chip in the AC adapter to reset. Try the same outlet and see if the problem returns and then goes away again after changing outlets to be sure, but I suspect it's just working correctly temporarily.

 

Those are my thoughts exactly, its only working temporarily. Ok will go and try the outlets I had an issue with just a moment ago really, thanks for the advice.

Attempting to search for similar problems I found a thread where you said that you actually went through like 5 PSU's for a Dell laptop in a year?

I'm thinking of purchasing a spare PSU, just in case, but they are actually not very cheap. Any recommendations?

 

Ah, yes. That was the old XPS M1730. They sent me a number of AC adapters. In hindsight, I think a big part of the problem was a defect in the design of that system rather than that many AC adapters failing. It had the "plugged in, not charging" problem to a very severe degree and frequently had issues like the one you are having with the AC adapter not being recognized. A fair number of us Alienware M17x R2 and M18x owners are Alienware customers because of XPS M1730 issues. It was a nice machine, but had tons of problems.

I think you may have merely received a bad one. I have had the AC adapter on my M18x replaced once in almost 2 years, but it just quit working. It was not the same error you are having. Having a spare is a good idea, but I don't think you will find this to be a frequent issue.

 

You can try:

Removing the battery, ac adapter and all peripherals, press and hold the power button for 1 minute and then try again (the laptop won't turn on)
Flash the BIOS of the computer to the latest version available.
Load the BIOS defaults by pressing F9 in the BIOS screen.

If none of that works and yous till have the issue you can let us know at [email protected] by sending an e-mail with your tag, phone and a brief description of the issue and we'll take care of the replacement.

 

I know from experience that you can get this error message if the ac adapter isn't 100% plugged into the laptop. I had this and got worried, as my laptop was still charging, but I had poor game performance and the warning.

To make matters worse, it happened right after a power outage caused by a storm...

Turns out it was all coincidence when I noticed the plug was slightly loose in the back, I pushed it back in and voila, no more problems.

I know this is probably a stupid question, but when you were doing all your different outlet tests, you did make sure it was plugged in, right? If not, maybe you finally fixed it by plugging it all the way in. Though, definitely, there are many other problems that could be going on, I just have to share since I had the same problem and I started freaking out before I realized it was slightly loose in the back.

 

Thanks Luis! Problem resolved itself, one thing that I did that may have triggered the episode is that I initially booted off of battery, then plugged it in, then unplugged it and put it to sleep, then awoke it plugged in. I received a few prompts indicating that for better performance I should switch to integrated graphics via F7 or something or other and then while I ran a game it the frames dropped to like 15 FPS from 50 after about 1 minute. At this point I restarted and got the messages. I think it was all of the above that triggered it as I haven't been able to reproduce it. Now I just shut down instead of going to sleep, SSD is fast enough for booting.

Good info, next time I will ensure I am completely plugged in, but I do believe I was. Thanks.

 

BTW....I LOVE MY M18x R2!

 

Awesome! At least you got it working

 

I have had this problem intermittently. I thought it was a "loose" connection on the power in at the laptop. When the problem occurs I wiggle it and the situation seems to correct itself. I am waiting to see it happen a few times to confim. Not sure if this is te same as your problem bro, but the symptoms / error message is the same.