Monthly Archives: July 2011

Updating my Dell Inspiron 1501 Bios

In two previous posts, (Dell Hell Again and Dell Hell Again continued), I told my tale of trying to update the BIOS on my old Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop.  Well I finally took the old 80GB hard drive, and loaded Windows XP on it, and then tried to update the BIOS.  Once again I got an error -144 message, but this time I went and Googled the error message and found many pages to read.  The Dell official forum pages were absolutely useless, but buried in the results I found a forum with a posting from 2008 with the same problem that I was having.  It suggested removing the battery and then running the BIOS update.  I did that and sure enough, it worked!

There is a saying that “no good deed goes unpunished”.  After feeling really good at what I had accomplished, I then plugged the battery back into the laptop and heard a “beep”.  Looking at the battery icon on the tray showed that the battery was “charging”, but at 0%.  I left the laptop alone for an hour and when I checked the battery again, it still said “charging” and “0%”.  So, in short, my laptop has the latest BIOS now, but will not charge the battery!

After reading about the battery not charging, I will have to replace the battery and/or the A/C adapter.  Dell and HP both put an extra wire in their A/C adapters that tells the Motherboard to “charge” the battery.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress, (or lack thereof).