Dell Latitude C600 power issue

Hi. I have a Dell Latitude C600 that has some power issue. I have two batteries for this laptop. One is (I believe) the original, that came with the laptop. I also have a second, extended life one.
I'm not quite sure what happened, but what I do know is that whenever I try to run the laptop on battery power, odd things happen. It works fine on AC except it will not charge the original battery, and the battery shows that it is at 0-1%. The charging light does come on, but only for about twenty (20) seconds. When I run the system off of the extended life battery, it will charge completely, but when I start up the machine, it will not boot-up any OS, including on floppies and CDs. In fact, I can't even turn it off by pressing or holding down the power button. As I said before, it works perfectly fine on AC, but when I unplug the AC cable, the whole machine locks up, until I reinsert the power cable. I have tried resetting the BIOS, and using the latest Flash BIOS updates from Dell's website. Nothing works.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
dellc600

 

I recall a recall on the C600 adapter - I don't know if that could be the cause. The batteries are quite old as well, no? That could be another. Do you have another similar machine you could test it out with?

 

No, adapter not in the recall, and extended life is only a few months old. The original battery worked perfectly until this boot problem.