UKC

I have a 6 year old DELL Laptop which is no longer in daily use.
It has been fine until recently when it shows plugged in/not charging when connected to the mains power spack.
1. How can I tell whether it really is charging or not?
2. If it eventually runs down will I lose any essential data when I unplug from the mains?

In reply to keith-ratcliffe:
Hi Keith. Are you using the original Dell charger?

Presuming the battery itself is ok then it could be the well known dell charger issue:

Dell were quite cute in that they fitted the charger with a chip and the laptop looks to see if this chip is present before allowing the battery to charge. Its done under the guise of 'safety' but really it is to make users buy a proper Dell charger! I've see lots of these that either aren't using the proper Dell charger OR the thin signal wire carried inside the charger cable becoming internally broken due to winding the wire around the charger when not in use.
You won't lose any data as its all saved to your hard drive.

Post edited at 17:47

In reply to wilkie14c:
Hi there - thanks for this info. It is the original DELL charger and before I fired it up today I decided to check whether it was working. I hadn't looked at the plug previously and intially tried a voltmeter on the outer shield and central (fine) wire. I got 0 volts so thought I had solved it then by accident I touched the probe on the internal shield and got the full 19.6 volts. I thus wondered what that central wire was for.
PS I need to edit my original post - The battery indicator says pluggedin/charging not as I originally said 'not charging' but the % available is going down over time.

In reply to keith-ratcliffe:

If I remember right, using a non dell charger on a dell laptop powers the machine but doesn't charge the battery. A broken signal wire somewhere between the black box and the jack plug would make the laptop think its a knock off charger as it wouldn't get the signal from the chip in the charger. However, batteries do age as I said and can simply shut down internally and won't charge. If you can get a known good dell charger to try it'd help - charging as normal would mean your original charger or the same fault would indicate a battery fault. Good luck!

In reply to wilkie14c:

Just to update this again, I've had another Dell 1545 in the workshop today, fault - powers up off the charger but windows shows battery present but not charging. The cause was a disintegrated power jack on the laptop itself. The DC power contacts still conducted juice to power it but the middle pin of the plug wasn't making contact with the contact within the actual socket. New DC jack fitted and battery now charging as normal. I actually replaced the 9 pin socket itself as I have a hot air rework station but to do this at home with a soldering iron is very hard indeed. This 1545 laptop has the power, USB and VGA-out sockets all on a daughter board though and the daughter board can be replaced as a whole and only costs a tenner.
Remembering today while working on this one, in the BIOS of these machines there is a setting that you can switch on that reports the use on a 'non' Dell charger. If your battery is showing not charging then check this option on and when it starts up the POST may well tell you there is a problem detected with the charger as it did in my case today. There isn't a problem its just that the laptop can't detect that ID chip inside the charger because of the busted socket so it reports a non Dell charger in use.
Hope this helps Dell users!