Dell Latitude C610 Power Problem

Hi, I am trying to fix a latitude C610 for one of my kids but I can't figure out what s causing this strange problem. If you boot the laptop with battery and the AC adapter not connected, the laptop post an goes into Windows. But if I connect the AC adapter when I boot the screen stays black and nothing happens, also if I connect the AC adapter in the middle of any process the laptop freezes. I have tried with another working adapter but same problem.

Can someone shed some light on what is going on here?

 

A fairly common problem with that series laptop (I owned one and also had a few in the office) is that the charging circuit goes bad. I bet this is what is going on with yours. You may want to research on google and ebay if you can get the charging circuit board alone but I'm not sure if it is seperate from the mainboard. I recall that the C800/C810 was seperate, yout it has been a while since I've had this laptop. So search ebay for the appropriate charging circuit or google to see if you can find that answer. Hope that helps...worse case scenario though is that it will run on battery only and motherboard will need replacement.

 

Thanks channelv, I suspected that the MB could be the problem since everything is integrated into it. Refurbished MB for this model are really cheap today at e-bay. Will get one.

Thanks, luiso16

 

Yes refurb or replacement motherboards for the C610 are cheap. The C610 was the first laptop I owned/purchased myself. The Inspiron 4100 is exactly the same laptop except for different cosmetics for the plastics, so you might try searching under that as well, although there definitely will be more parts available for the C610. The video card is actually removeable and upgradable on that system too, rather than being soldered on the mainboard as 99% of laptops are. It came with either an ATI Radeon 8mb or 16mb DDR, and the Inspiron 4100 topped out with a Geforce 2 go 32mb DDR (this card works fine in the C610 as well). I've done this swap in a C610 I owned a while back. I upgraded that laptop to 1gb RAM (the maximum it can do), mini PCI wireless card, and the Geforce 2 go 32mb DDR. I also upgraded the LCD to a SXGA+. I basically did everything I could do possibly to upgrade that machine by buying parts cheap off ebay - it was fun. And even today it is still a worthy machine for basic and business use.

Now that I think about it, I am 100% sure the charging circuit is on the mainboard itself and not a seperate PCB, so looks like the mainboard will need replacing. On the C810 it was actually seperate and replaceable (search DC board for C810 on ebay). It's not hard to replace the mainboard, just work slowly and be patient, making sure not to drop those little screws onto the new motherboard - I destroyed a computer that way before - a screw dropped onto the mainboard and zapped it due to static discharge or shorting a circuit. Crazy!

 

I'm not sure if this is the case, but it strikes me that you could swap in the mainboard from a C640 (P4, ATI Radeon Mobility 7500C 32MB).

 

That is correct that the C640 board and plastics are all compatible with the C610 as well, the only difference was the power button bezel, as in the C640 it had a vent over the portion where the heatsink was. The C640 though in my opinion was an inferior machine if you compare it to a C610 that has a PIII Tualatin based 512k L2 1.2ghz CPU. The PIII outperforms all C640s except maybe those P4 2.0ghz and up due to the inefficient netburst architecture of that P4. Also the C640 runs MUCH MUCH hotter, gets much worse battery life and really all around isn't an upgrade. The C640 went up to 2.2 or 2.4ghz, but realistically at those speeds and thermal design, it throttled down more often then not even at load. Stick with the C610 or look into upgrading that to a PIII 1.2ghz Tualatin if it isn't already. The Tualatin based PIII at 1.2ghz is as fast as a Pentium 4 at around 1.8-2.0ghz.

 

A properly running C640 should outperform a C610. I've got a 1.7 C640 and got the opportunity to benchmark it against a higher-end C610 (1.0Ghz IIRC) that came in for service where I work. Both machines were running Windows XP and had 512MB RAM. Using 3dMark2001 (newer versions didn't really run the tests properly) the C640's score was double that of the C610.

Did the C610 ever offer an onboard wireless solution (the one I used to benchmark against my C640 didn't and haven't seen any others)? I was able to drop an Intel 2200BG mini-PCI card in my C640 with no issues.

 

I don't have numbers but I had a C610 and when benchmarking I recall it had equal or better performance than a P4 1.7ghz all while running cooler and with longer battery life - although I don't have hard data to back it up right now. Try looking in Sisoft Sandra's reference CPUs and compare the Tualatin 1.2ghz to a P4 1.8ghz.

 

Hey guys finally got a replacement MB at ebay at a very cheap price. The problem that I have now is that these MBs come locked with an Admin password from factory and the bios settings are locked. Does anyone knows which is this password?

Let me know. Thanks, luiso16

 

I believe there was a way to unlock it or at least some default passwords to try for the BIOS. I found them by googling and searching a lot, and also by searching the support.dell.com forums. You'll need to do these searches though as I don't recall what they were, but the information is there if you take the time to search it up. However there is a chance that the BIOS password is not a factory one and was put in by someone else later - if that's the case then it may be more of a problem. I do vaguely remember a program that could still bypass or overwrite this for the C610 - again search google and also the Dell support forums.