are you sure that dell do not do a driver so the OS can see the battery ,i find it odd that dell would have this sort of bug on there system
you could make a boot disk and do it from dos as i see there have a bios upgrade that work in dos
Don't find it odd, apparently it's a common problem on Dell laptops for the bios not to see the battery. Infact if you study the readme file included with this Bios it says that it may fix the error that the bios doesn't recognise the battery!!! It doesn't stop the battery working or charging, just it being detected. It took a bit of searching and I finally found the answer. As you thought it does need a bootable floppy, I used this method.
1. Attach USB floppy (none installed on my lappy)
2. Format DOS startup disk.
3. Drop bios file (I called mine Bios09) on to floppy
4. Ensure battery is fully charged and mains adapter connected.
5. Restart pc and boot from floppy
6. Once at the A prompt type the following
bios09(or whatever your bios upgrade name is) /forceit /nvram
(remember to include the spaces between the command line switches)
I've seen this problem posted a lot around the net but very few answers that actually work.. however this one did for me.
Cheers :drink: