ABOUT

The Dell C400 is a pain when it comes to the Battery , becuase it can be tempermental

Bad Conditioning of the battery is Common it comes usually From Lazyiness to use your new item straight away and the fact that 50% of people don't read the manuals of an item until they actually need to find something out.

In other words its like giving a cat dog food , it is going to make it ill and it needs Vet attenion but in our case we are talking Batteries not cats ! , and we need to look at it quickly and not leave as it is.

There are way's of repairing a battery by reconditing but it it does not always work and takes alot of time and care , in this case we are looking at the Dell C-series batteries.

The Dell C400 Battery which this site covers comes in 2 types the Normal use 1600MAH battery (1.5Hrs) and the High capacity 3600MAH battery (good For 2Hrs +) to recondition it is difficult DELL does not offer a Recalibration Util for this laptop , unless the RECAL ult works which i am unable to test as my own c400 does not have a floppy drive. 

Step 1.

Let any power in your Laptop Drain , by using power hungry apps and also setting windows Power settings to always on , Video's are usually good at draining the Battery. once the battery is completely dead charge it up switched off with adaptor in. again follow this procedure a few times and hopefully you will get an improvement in battery life.

Dont Panic if the Battery Light goes out i have an orignal Dell one that does this but it still charges to 100% Full even though it does not last long !.

Final Words

it may take a few discharge cycles to even see an improvement , if all this fails you may need to buy a new dell battery or buy a Universal Battery which has more power but cannot be put in the laptop but will produce about the same amount of time as the dell travel Battery ( both these options are Quite Expensive) then there would be the Ulimate in cost the Other dell High capacity battery which can run to upwards of over $300 or about £190 new in the united Kingdom but if correctly Charged and Conditioned will last over 7 Hours. that's Nearly the same amount of time it takes from the united kingdom to florida in the USA.