This laptop came to me just to have Office reinstalled and of course I refuse to let a problem stump me. Here is what I know so far. Bios, drivers, OS, everything has been updated.

It ran fine while plugged in and with a semi-fresh Vista install. I suspected some ACPI driver corruption nonsense since the laptop runs fine in safe mode on battery power. Dell shipped me one of their field restore DVDs which contained the customer's original WinXP downgrade. So that eliminated the corrupt install, sketchy OS, and any driver variables. Safemode still works fine.

BIOS shows the battery health as normal and it correctly charges and depletes as well.
Knoppix runs fine from a live CD on battery.
Backtrack4 runs fine from a USB key on battery.
Hibernation and any other power saving features have been disabled.
Zero bad sectors were found on the hard drive.
Passes all basic Dell Diagnostics tests.

I have not been able to track down a known working 2.5" SATA drive as of yet to test some kind of power consumption issue with the HDD and other than that I'm completely stumped.

Ideas?

7/6/2009 11:24:20 AM

Disabling the Quadro NVS 140M has stabilized the system, but I've tried different drivers and even different OS's. wtf?

7/6/2009 3:00:06 PM

are you using the quadro specific drivers or the general geforce drivers? The geforce ones work, but i had problems with them on some quadro desktop cards. Replacing the drivers with the quadro specific ones fixed the issue.

7/6/2009 3:09:42 PM

NVidia does not have Quadro 140M drivers available, they direct you to the manufacturer and state that desktop drivers will not install. (I'm sure there are ways around this, but why would the problem follow me from Vista and then a complete Dell image restore of WinXP)

7/6/2009 3:15:58 PM

because the drivers are probably the same :-P.

7/6/2009 3:30:21 PM

This sounds like some bug in BIOS. Check and maybe reset it to default and work from there. Maybe even CMOS reset the thing. ACPI was a good start but all it does it is directly work with BIOS.

Also I had a friend that has nightmares with her dell. Been hearing a lot of bugs lately with power connectors on them. Sure its not a bad connector or join?

7/6/2009 4:53:10 PM

Positive. The laptop runs fine on A/C power and runs fine on battery power on every type of live cd or safe mode I had.

7/6/2009 8:01:36 PM

Ahhh, I mis read that wrong like it wasnt charging or something..

Windows is very CPU intensive vs linux and with the pwr management in ACPI I bet is crashing it. Is it just dying or BSOD or what exactly? Youve ruled out ACPI issues so id maybe trackdown another battery just to check? Battery may be dis and recharging correctly but if the voltage or current is off, its fucking with some regulators somewhere. That or you have a bad regulator on the board somewhere. Theres so much hardware that could be causing this and windows hits it just right.

Worse off, if its under warranty, get dell to replace the mobo. They dont want to troubleshoot it, just bitch about the network port being bad, what I always did when i had any weird mobo related issue, as they know they burn out.

7/7/2009 1:10:05 PM

Yeah, my rep already overnighted a replacement motherboard. <3 Gold Pro support.

7/7/2009 1:58:23 PM

^ I hear ya on that. Gawd i miss having it on mine.

7/10/2009 12:37:56 AM