My Dell was fatally zapped by a power hit a few months ago, so going from
memory here....

On bootup, the machine would issue an AC Adapter-not-recognized message
-- which could be avoided by booting up on battery power and then plugging in.
Of course, if the machine was shut down when the battery power was low,
I needed to be plugged in when powering up the next time -- a conundrum.

At least I could work-around and get it to recharge -- I read reports of others
who weren't so lucky and had symptoms similar to, but not exactly the same,
as mine. If you Google Inspiron + "AC Adapter" or somesuch,
you'll be able to get more details -- including problem reports going back several
years.

Once the problem appeared, the battery also "seemed" to drain quicker --
altho' it was 18 mos old at that pt., not a problem at all until the onset.

Just coping w/ this for some time, I suspect that the adapter was still fine,
the battery was still fine, the recharging was still fine, but there was some
sort of corruption of the battery util. But reflashing the BIOS, reinstalling
latest system utils, etc., could never clear up the problem -- something
was screwed up/corrupted at a very basic level when I simply shut the machine
down after getting a low-power warning on a flight.

>Can you expand on what that bug is? Like I said, I've had zero problems with my Dell laptop.
>
>
>>From what I've read, declining customer satisfaction has been the trend with Dell
>>in recent years. Perhaps a consequence of how big the company has become....
>>Whatever, my gripe is not that there was a bug in Dell's laptop -- bugs happen.
>>My strenuous objection is that such a significant problem has gone unrectified for such
>>a long time. So Dell can't plead ignorance -- that's pure neglect. I have zero doubt that
>>Dell has continued to sell its machines with full knowledge that this problem exists, and,
>>to me, that speaks volumes about the kind of company that Dell has become.
>>
>>While I've admired Michael Dell since the early years of PC's Limited and his
>>10MHz/12Mhz screamers, today's Dell has lost me as a customer.