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A few months ago, I replaced a broken cord for my Dell Inpsiron 15 laptop. The replacement cord (a slightly different model from the factory cord) worked perfectly until a week ago, when I started experiencing problems. My battery refused to charge and I saw errors like these, indicating that either my new charger is broken or my laptop isn't detecting it properly.
As long as I stayed plugged in, my battery percentage would stay constant. On a few separate occasions the problem would temporarily disappear and my battery would charge for a few hours, although it has since dropped to 0% and hasn't gone back up. My charger is not overheating; if anything it feels cooler than it did before this problem appeared.
I can use my laptop fine as long as it stays plugged in, but my performance has been greatly impacted. Notably, my laptop runs just as fast regardless of what power plan I access. Right now, despite being on "high performance" mode, even such basic tasks as resizing my browser window and opening new tabs take several seconds and look quite jumpy.
So now, my question: given the situation I've described, is it possible or advisable to somehow lessen the negative impact on my computer's performance? It's greatly impeding the efficiency with which I do... well, everything on my computer, and has made it absolutely impossible to play video games (I got 5 frames per second when I tried).
Also, is there any way to tell whether it's the charger or the laptop that's causing the problem? I'm inclined to think it's the laptop since it's about two years old, nothing's broken on it yet, and power systems are almost always the first things to go. The timing with purchasing the new is a little suspect though.
I'm dual booting Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu. Performance impacts only visible on windows but battery not charging for either OS. Windows has been laggier than Ubuntu for basic desktop operations for a while now, although switching to high performance mode normally fixed this.