Need help with Dell 1501 startup

[TheBishop]

A firend on mine has a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop with xp

When you hit the on button, you first you see is:

Battery not seen, cannot charge battery, (The battery is there and it does run on battery power)

The prompt is: Hit F2 for Setup, after you hit F2 it says entering setup, but it cannot find it even after two hours of looking.

My thought is to reformat and reload everything from orginal CD's.

This is a new problem I've not seen before.

Any ideas.

 

[MyCattMaxx]

There is a separate battery for the BIOS.
At the age of the laptop the battery is probably bad.
The battery retains the setting in the BIOS: time etc.

Hitting F2 puts you in the BIOS menu.
It is possible the bad battery is keeping you from BIOS, not sure on that.

Do not format or try to reinstall windows.

Besides the F2 prompt does it say press F1 to continue?

 

[TheBishop]

It has a continue option but if you click it, it simple returns to hit f2 for setup or F12 for Boot seq. but then option start windows normally or safe mode.

After windows XP runs, and opens, kinksys unsecure wireless is seen but cannot aquire IP address, for help with Dell.com

After restart, same as above.

 

[TheBishop]

It did say "any" key to continue not F1

 

[johnb35]

So you can boot into windows? If so, then I basically had the same issue when I had my 1501. Download and install the latest bios for it and that usually fixes it. You may have to set the time and data in the bios or windows if its wrong.

Here is the bios update file, just download and run it.


http://www.dell.com/support/drivers...roductCode=inspiron-1501&urlProductCode=False