Andy’s Technotes and commentary

I purchased a battery for a Dell Inspiron 6000 from eBay seller WebExpress4u.
When installed into the Dell I got:

“Warning: The battery cannot be identified. The system will be unable to charge this battery. Press any key to continue.”

And true to the warning the battery would not charge.
I searched for a solution on the internet and flashed the BIOS to the latest rev and the problem remained.
I emailed the seller and got a form letter response about RMA-ing the battery back.l.
I sent the battery back and got a UPS delivery confirmation on 8/10/09.
After three weeks I emailed the seller. They claimed they had never received the battery.
Within a day or two they found the battery and sent me a new one that had the exact same problem on two different Inspiron 6000.
My best guess is the Dell BIOS checks the battery for authenticity and refuses to charge a non-Dell battery.
I asked the seller for a refund and got it within a couple days.
I am out the $7 to ship back to the seller but at least they have not asked me to return the unusable battery at my expense.

At least the seller did not require me to return the second incompatible batter, not that I would have anyway.

Tried Windows7 32 bit clean install on this notebook.
Loads and runs but device manager reports driver errors on Coprocessor and two “Base Devices”. The base devices are the card reader and the error goes away when you install the Vista card reader drivers from HP.
No chipset drivers available from HP or Nvidia for this model.
Tried HP Vista Nvidia graphics driver in “compatibility mode”. Installed but did no fix the error.
Coprocessor error is intractable.
Upgraded BIOS did not help

HP+Nvidia=crappy lappy in oh so many ways!