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Solved, sort of.
Used battery to under 5 minutes left. Did some more work; then shut down and took train home.
Powered up. Screen said something about battery being low and to hit F1 to continue. I plugged cable in (I already had but I'd forgotten the next plug).
Multiple reboots showed almost nothing. Screen monotone except 1-2" at top of screen showing vertical stripes and semi-random 2-tone dithering in horizontal tiling. No motion on screen. (I'm vague here about color/B&W because of unrelated display problem coinciding.) A few minutes later, screen goes black with one short beep. Battery LED on; no other LEDs on. I think the computer is already off, so I don't press the power button to turn it off.
Repeated boot attempts. Same results.
Deciding to repair the other problem, I unplug AC power and start dismantling. Notice battery LED is still on. Notice fan/s are on. I think design would have cut fans off when battery's low and AC is off, so fan blowing looks like a symptom. (I might be wrong about that; the Pentium 4 being hot means maybe they'd rather the battery run a fan to the last second.)
Removing battery turns battery LED off.
I plug AC power back in and boot. Boot begins normally. I promptly go into setup. BIOS says both batteries are out (I only own 1 battery for it); that's correct. I slide the battery in. It registers as idle. In a moment, it auto-re-registers as charging, and is at 45% power, says BIOS. I have no idea how it could possibly be at 45%, unless Linux was lying earlier about there being only 5 minutes left (it went from 1 hr 15 min to 0 hr 5 min remaining in an estimated 30-45 min, perhaps because I turned display brighter and was repeatedly browsing and saving to a flash thumb stick drive, although not printing).
I let bootup continue. Normal. The only glitches are in Linux and maybe just in its Gnome desktop environment, I've had those glitches before, and they're minor. I cure them with a warm reboot.
A hour or so later of AC, the battery is at 100%, says Linux. Things are fine since then. Dell Latitude C840. It lives.
Thanks.
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Nick
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