Dell 3100 Chromebooks dying

[aydee]

Hi All,

We have had at least 5 Dell 3100 Chromebooks die out of the blue in the last 2 weeks. They will only power up if we unplug the batteries and use a 45W charger. as soon as i plug the battery back in again, it all shuts off and refuses to even try and power up.
These are orginally from the DfE during the Covid times, and were manufactured in 2020, incase anyone else is seeing this happen?

[Fazza]

A new battery should solve your problem.  When the battery dies and doesn't work it wont let you power on the laptop, yet if you remove the 'faulty' battery then no error exists so it will let you power them on!

 

A genuine replacement from Dell is around £21+VAT.

 

What I would do is take a battery out of a working laptop, put it in the ones that wont turn on when the battery is connected and if that works then I'd order some replacement batteries at that price and get a few more years usage out of them.

[TwistedHelixis]

There are some hidden button presses that fix some of these issues.

 

Press and hold Esc + Refresh , then while holding those press the Power button for a few seconds.
When the wipe screen opens just reboot or turn off the Chromebook using the power button.

 

Hopefully that helps

 

EDIT (Refresh = a round arrow icon along the top row of buttons)

Edited December 9, 2025 by TwistedHelixis

[aydee]

22 hours ago, Fazza said:

A new battery should solve your problem.  When the battery dies and doesn't work it wont let you power on the laptop, yet if you remove the 'faulty' battery then no error exists so it will let you power them on!

 

A genuine replacement from Dell is around £21+VAT.

 

What I would do is take a battery out of a working laptop, put it in the ones that wont turn on when the battery is connected and if that works then I'd order some replacement batteries at that price and get a few more years usage out of them.

Yes, looks like its the batteries. Can't believe that i didnt think to try this myself!
Thank you.

[aydee]

18 hours ago, TwistedHelixis said:

There are some hidden button presses that fix some of these issues.

 

Press and hold Esc + Refresh , then while holding those press the Power button for a few seconds.
When the wipe screen opens just reboot or turn off the Chromebook using the power button.

 

Hopefully that helps

 

EDIT (Refresh = a round arrow icon along the top row of buttons)

Normally a powerwash, or at least using that menu does fix a great deal of things. Unfortunatly, it cant help this one as i dont get any indication of power anywhere. Thanks for the help though!

[aydee]

As an update to this, I have just done a full check of all my Dell 3100's, and of 41, I currently have 21 that are having this issue, which seems too many for it to be a random battery issue. As far as i am aware, its only been over the last 2 weeks its been happening, but as a majority of these CB's are stored on the other side of the school, i cant confirm this timeline.

Anyone else seeing this happen? @MS97 I think you might have seen this with yours?

[TwistedHelixis]

I have a bunch of these at different schools, purchased at different times and only had one or two fail.

[MS97]

Hi @aydee,

 

Yep - happening here too. 4 so far and they all came from a certain trolley.

Technician has tried the same as you and come up with the same result.

 

Bit weird how it seems to be a certain model failing....I wonder if there was a firmware update pushed out which affected some and not others. Perhaps a certain batch? I don't know if there is a way to check... 

[Chr1S1rhC]

Old poster here, been a while and cant access my old account.... anyway sorry for the necro but..

 

77 Dell 3100s in the space of a week gone from 5 hour plus battery life to 10 minutes or less.

 

All have battery health of circa 12%, all DFE supplied in covid and Dell just don't want to know!

 

I get these are old, but I have a ton of older chromebooks that are still perfectly useable on original batteries, highly suspicious of buying anything Dell now.

 

[Dos_Box]

2 hours ago, Chr1S1rhC said:

Old poster here, been a while and cant access my old account.... anyway sorry for the necro but..

Check your PM's  

[synaesthesia]

3 hours ago, Chr1S1rhC said:

Old poster here, been a while and cant access my old account.... anyway sorry for the necro but..

 

77 Dell 3100s in the space of a week gone from 5 hour plus battery life to 10 minutes or less.

 

All have battery health of circa 12%, all DFE supplied in covid and Dell just don't want to know!

 

I get these are old, but I have a ton of older chromebooks that are still perfectly useable on original batteries, highly suspicious of buying anything Dell now.

 

To be fair, 6 years is plenty long enough for a battery and I would absolutely expect them to want replacing regardless of how well other batteries do. They may report health statuses differently.

However, I'd suggest popping one open and making sure the batteries are physically OK - any sign of any bulging take them all out of service immediately until you replace the batteries. I would not expect any manufacturer to be interested in batteries failing at that age, it's beyond expectancy for lion cells especially those in edu service.

[Chr1S1rhC]

20 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

To be fair, 6 years is plenty long enough for a battery and I would absolutely expect them to want replacing regardless of how well other batteries do. They may report health statuses differently.

However, I'd suggest popping one open and making sure the batteries are physically OK - any sign of any bulging take them all out of service immediately until you replace the batteries. I would not expect any manufacturer to be interested in batteries failing at that age, it's beyond expectancy for lion cells especially those in edu service.

 

The batteries are physically fine and from the limited sampling I've done so far show very low cycles, most less than 100. 

What compounds the issue for me is that I have much much older Dell chromebooks in use daily that are still on their original batteries and are fully able to do multiple hours of use, the one currently in front of me is from 2015! These are only being retired even now because we can no longer monitor them, otherwise they would be still fine for use. 

 

I suppose I'm hinting that this feels like a planned obsolescence to me, or that these batteries had a built in lifespan that I have never seen before from any of our chromebooks over the last decade or more. 

 

[synaesthesia]

Things are definitely different - our last batch of staff laptops from 2023 & 24 are showing noticeable drops in battery life and that irritates the hell out of me. I have a strong preference for the batteries made up of 18650 cells, but that's going back a few years now!

100 cycles though for 6 year old devices is good going, they shouldn't be dropping like that  Do you have an account manager at Dell you could try and pull some strings with, or plead poverty?

"We're considering replacing 200 desktops in the near future and if this is the level of service or quality we can expect we might have to look elsewhere" would be my preference

[Chr1S1rhC]

I didn't have an account manager until today, so the guy who just gained a new school is having a great welcome from me haha!

And strangely I did mention we are looking to purchase 120 in the next few weeks that as it stands wouldn't be Dell, that may of helped.

 

100 cycles was the highest, I have another here I'm testing that has 66 cycles and only 11% battery health remaining. 

I'm starting to wonder if these have gone round the clock and started from zero again, its the only explanation that makes sense 

 

[synaesthesia]

What's a cycle count as in their eyes, full charge & discharge?

[aydee]

Yeah, what supprised me, is even with our 3100's, which were 2020 purchases, they have only 200 Cycles, but they have for sure had more than that. They get flattened at least every other day if not every day, so it should be much higher than that, and the fact that we had 30 all die out in a 10-ish day period, IDK, it doesnt feel natural, but i cant fathom what it could be. If it were an update, surely all of our other 40+ currently working 3100's would be bricked too etc...

[Chr1S1rhC]

3 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

What's a cycle count as in their eyes, full charge & discharge?

AI says  - A Dell battery cycle count measures the total number of times a battery charges and discharges, equivalent to 100% of its capacity, regardless of individual charging sessions.

 

[Chr1S1rhC]

3 minutes ago, aydee said:

Yeah, what supprised me, is even with our 3100's, which were 2020 purchases, they have only 200 Cycles, but they have for sure had more than that. They get flattened at least every other day if not every day, so it should be much higher than that, and the fact that we had 30 all die out in a 10-ish day period, IDK, it doesnt feel natural, but i cant fathom what it could be. If it were an update, surely all of our other 40+ currently working 3100's would be bricked too etc...

Your seeing exactly what's happening here now, just that our remaining working ones appear to be getting less and less by the day.

 

I have tried rolling back OS versions to the early 120s and the only noticeable difference was how much battery time remained from a full charge, some reported 20 minutes where newer releases showed much less. They all died in roughly 5 minutes so it was never accurate.

 

[synaesthesia]

Ah, so a cycle would be if a laptop was initially at 100%, used half to 50%, put back on charge back to full then used again to 50% charge, that's a cycle.

Then I suppose once you take into account the average day for a chromebook - starts at 100%, taken by a student who can't find the B key because someone scratched half off it off, puts it back at 98% but not on charge, picked up by next student when its down to 95%, used for half an hour and put back not on charge, at 70%, used as a frisbee for a while then put back on charge by a teacher who stubbed their toe on it after dragging it out of a urinal, gets up to 80% before the next student decides they want to use it for 5 minutes then puts it back, 75% - rinse and repeat every single period until the laptop thinks it's a fridge-freezer, the battery thinks it's a tesla and elon musk is coming to pardon the klingons!

Usage may vary

Regardless however the 3100 are edu specific, surely they'd last a bit longer than that

[Chr1S1rhC]

Top battery  - Pulled from a 2015 Dell Chromebook 11   - Cycles 394, battery health 87.18%  - lost capacity 502 mAh

Bottom battery - Pulled from a 2020 Dell 3100 - Cycles 67, battery health 11.38% unknow lost capacity

[TheHyperTechie]

We have about 120 1:1 Dell 3100 chromebooks. They were purchased last year, I haven't received any complaints about battery life issues (yet!)

 

They have AUP until 2029, so I am hoping for them to last until then.

[Fazza]

Sounds like you might need to invest in an NLBA battery analyser:

 

https://www.laptopu.ro/

[Fazza]

Batteries these days seem to last around 3 years and then that's that.

On my retro computing workbench at home I have a 22 year old laptop (with the original battery) that still charges to 100% and gives over 1 hour and 20 minutes of battery time which is what they would have roughly had back then!  It looks like it was used by a council (load of documents on it before I ran Active KillDisk on it and then did a full factory restore!