I've been having same issue. I think I've found an answer. If you hold down the power button (with charger disconnected) for 4 minutes, it supposedly does a deep battery discharge. I then plugged it back in, waited a few minutes and booted it up. In the past, when battery was depleted and I plugged it back in, I'd get the orange light, till it charged for about an hour. This time it booted after just a few minutes. This seems to be the same concept as above (removing battery) without having to do that. The Venue 8 seems to have an issue Dell will not discuss that causes problem, which is sometimes, when you shut down windows, Venue actually goes into sleep mode not shutdown, but you think it's off, so battery runs down.