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I am not familiar with the TracFone V170 but most phones now communicate with the battery. They do this because the battery contains a small computer chip which monitors the charge state, temperature etc.. If this chip is faulty or missing because it is a cheap copy battery, some phones will not work properly. They usually power up okay but will not charge or will charge really slowly. There are various messages they may give including "alien battery", "Invalid Battery" to name a few. If it is unable to communicate with the battery, it will not usually charge as fast as it could because it cannot tell if the battery is overheating so it will always trickle charge an unknown battery.
You will notice a battery like this because it has at least three battery connections. Older ones only had two.
It's not something you should try and fix yourself. If you've eliminated the battery and the charger as being the source of the problems, you will need to return it to Gateway to get it fixed. If you try to fix it yourself and do something wrong, you will invalidate the warranty on top of everything else. Better to be safe than sorry.
Totally discharging the battery is the way to go. But what you can also do to use your phone in the meantime is this. Plug your charger into the phone withOUT your battery in. It will tell you "Unable to Charge." When it says this, put the battery in. It might tell you "Invalid Battery" a couple more times, but it did eventually say "Charging Battery" for me. After that, simply turn the phone on and it will return to normal. This is when you drain the battery completely. Once I did that, I did not get the invalid battery error again.
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