Dell Latitude D530 Milk Incident! Now it does not run from battery...

[tom66]

A friend of mine spilt milk over his work laptop, a Dell Latitude D530. Without crying, he unplugged it and turned it off but did not remove the battery. After the incident, when plugged in, the power LED would briefly light, but the laptop would not boot.

I completely disassembled the laptop and cleaned the motherboard and keyboard. Now I can get it to boot up from an AC adapter and it seems to work. But it does not seem to run from the battery. The battery test reports charged (little indicator on the battery.) But if AC power is unplugged it will just die immediately.

The spill was in the area over the HDD and PCMCIA slot... away from the battery bay.

Any ideas on what to check?

[yyonline]

Re: Dell Latitude D530 Milk Incident! Now it does not run from battery...

Check for burnt or shorted MOSFETs in the battery charging circuit. I've found them to be the cause of about 80% of battery charging issues. If it's not that, it's usually a controller chip, and that's a bit harder to find a replacement for.

[selldoor]

Re: Dell Latitude D530 Milk Incident! Now it does not run from battery...

How does it report in windows (if using windows?) control panel -power options- power meter in XP)

How does it report in the bios (F2 on start perhaps)
Did it run from battery prior to the incident?

[b700029]

Re: Dell Latitude D530 Milk Incident! Now it does not run from battery...

Check for burnt or shorted MOSFETs in the battery charging circuit. I've found them to be the cause of about 80% of battery charging issues. If it's not that, it's usually a controller chip, and that's a bit harder to find a replacement for.

I agree with this.

The symptoms are consistent with an open battery-side MOSFET.

If you can figure out how to download schematic from here you can find exactly which parts to check:
http://www.elvikom.pl/forum/viewtopic.php?p=38896

[tom66]

Re: Dell Latitude D530 Milk Incident! Now it does not run from battery...

Thanks all. I found some latent milk near the battery connector (hidden between the contacts), and cleaned that - it seems to work now from both AC and battery. I've told him not to eat Cheerios near his laptop again, but he's just glad it all works. I'm not quite sure how milk got there as the spill was on the left hand side of the laptop.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Dell Latitude D530 Milk Incident! Now it does not run from battery...

Thanks all. I found some latent milk near the battery connector (hidden between the contacts), and cleaned that - it seems to work now from both AC and battery. I've told him not to eat Cheerios near his laptop again, but he's just glad it all works. I'm not quite sure how milk got there as the spill was on the left hand side of the laptop.

He tipped it to try and dump the milk out.
.