In article ,
Sam Goldwasser wrote:

This is a Presario 1200 series. It works fine in every other respect
but not only does the battery not charged or recognized, there is no
evidence that the OS even knows this is a laptop with a battery.
Device Manager has no entry for battery management and the "Power Options"
entry in Control Panel doesn't have a battery mode.

So, is this bad OS install or bad hardware? It's XP. Yes, believe it or not,
I'm not running Dos 3.0 on this one.

Could be any of the above.

As I understand it, older laptops used a combination of
vendor-proprietary features, and APM, to provide support for battery
and power management. Newer laptops use ACPI. Windows XP supports
both, but prefers ACPI - APM-only laptops may or may not have ACPI
support enabled by default. Even if the laptop does support ACPI,
it's possible that XP can't use it - there were a fairly substantial
number of systems which have defective ACPI tables in their BIOSen
which don't function properly with some operating system ACPI
interpreters.

According to Wikipedia, the 1200 series actually includes a wide range
of variations... you might have a model with a bogus APM or ACPI.
It's even possible that you have a model so old that neither standard
is supported, and vendor-proprietary drivers are needed in order to
enable power management.

First suggestion: boot up into the BIOS setup screens, and see if
you can tell whether APM or ACPI is supported, and (if so) whether
it's enabled.

Second suggestion: boot up Knoppix or a similar CD-ROM-based Linux
distribution (which won't disrupt your XP install). See if it can
"see" any of the battery or power management support. If so, this
would indicate that the hardware is probably OK, and that XP doesn't
have the right set of drivers or configuration.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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