Dell 1520 problem

So I have a 3 year old Dell Inspiron 1520, the battery recently went dead. Cant charge and cannot hold a charge. Runs fine with the ac adaptor plugged in without moving it. However I can not play games on it that I have been able to play before. Is this because I am running solely on the ac adaptor? Surely there must be a way to run full performance running from the wall.

 

That sounds about right for a 3 year old battery, especially if you used it a lot.

Performance wise, you should get the best performance from AC power. I would look at software as being the culprit.

One thing to note, especially if you have a nVidia graphics card, is to make sure that you clean the vents and the heatsink in order to keep it cool.

 

Simply running off AC shouldn't reduce the performance of your machine. Are you by any chance getting an "AC adapter not recognized" error or something along those lines?

 

its a clean install of windows 7 so its not any programs slowing it down. All drivers are installed correctly

 

So under the power settings, what does it say you are on there?
I know by default, it generally is on the "normal" setting so try and bump it up to high performance.
Are the games also ok to play under W7?

 

Were you able to play these games fine before on Windows 7, or were you playing them on Vista/XP? Some games don't play as well under Win7.

Also, is it only certain games that aren't playing well, or ALL games? If it's all games (except Minesweeper, Solitaire, and other really old ones), you probably have an issue such as DirectX not being updated. This package from Microsoft will update your DX9 to a 2010 version. That should get your DX9 games playing. There ought to be a DX10/11 update floating around somewhere, too, which should get those games running.

Try running some of the tests in the DirectXDiagnostic, too (hit Win+R, type "dxdiag" [without quotes] in the Run prompt, and hit Enter, go to Display tab). If they fail, you probably need to update your DX.

The 1520 can definitely run at full tilt without the battery, though - I've done it before just for the sake of doing so. Unfortunate that your battery is conking out, but I can't say I'm too surprised - mine's at a bit more than 1/3 of what it was new. Just shy of 3 years isn't too bad for a laptop battery, though.

 

I thought these laptops enabled speedstep when there was no battery?