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Miscellaneous laptop discussions : Replacement battery question
Replacement battery question
by gopher38 - 1/17/07 8:04 AMHello,
Here's my situation:
I have an old Pavillion N5430, that I should probably upgrade, but I'm living in France right now, and don't want to buy an AZERTY-keyboard notebook. Besides, I think I'll buy a desktop when I get back to the US anyway. Plus, I've added memory and a bigger disk to the Pavilion, and - honestly - it does everything I need right now anyway. Only problem is that the battery was original, so 5 or 6 years old, and could only hold about a 30 second charge, so I thought I'd buy a replacement battery and have a functional machine to hold me over for the year or so til I'm back in the US. So I ordered a new battery for when I was home over Christmas and carried it back to France with me, put it in place, charged it up and everything looked peachy. But when I unplugged it from AC to take it into my TV room to do a little work, it just stopped abruptly. Not a gentle shut down - just bang, dead, after a couple of minutes. Before it died though, the battery was showing 100% full, so I don't think it's anything to do with it not charging, it seems to be more of a compatibility problem, even though the site definitely says it's supposed to be compatible (and it fits perfectly in the slot). Problem is, when the notebook dies, it dies so abruptly that it screws up some files, so I actually reloaded the disk image (which I'd backed up). I tried it a couple of times more, and the computer dies regularily when running on battery power (fine on AC) after 30 seconds to 5 minutes or so of activity. Sometimes I have to take the battery completely out to try re-booting. I've stopped this because I can't imagine that it's easy on my poor old laptop. :o Now the question.
Is it worth it to try reordering another replacement battery? Could it be that I just got a bad one? Does that happen (bad batteries)? I guess I'm thinking that it's a simple device and so they are never "bad", in which case it doesn't do any good to try again. Maybe the replacements just aren't 100% compatible (and HP doesn't sell originals anymore for this model) 
Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
Bad Battery
by nino88 - 1/20/07 8:41 PM In reply to: Replacement battery question by gopher38Where did you buy the replacement battery from? I bought a few times replacement batteries from my laptops and cell phones(from a few different online stores even ebay). I can't argue that they're very cheap compare to the original. But none of them could last. Some of them, after a few chargings, had the same issue like yours. IMHO, the problem is dead cells. Most generic batteries don't have good quality control and even use bad cells those didn't pass the standard for named manufacturers to cut corners. That's how they sell them cheap. So when one or more cells in your laptop's battery went dead (sudden voltage drop), the whole battery doesn't have enough voltage to power your notebook, hence your laptop suddenly died. When you charge it again, the voltage went up abruptly and even the almost dead cell or bad cell will hold some voltage thus it can power back your laptop. Wehn you use it again, that bad cell will lose the voltage again and kill your laptop.
And other ones' holding power dropped dramatically after just a month or so.
For notebooks, I've never wanted to buy anything else but the original. If you can't buy from the manufacture, you can try going to any computer stores and see if they have any generic batteries compatible to your notebook. Those big computer stores's generic batteries are not so bad or else they won't take any risk carrying them. If it's not available also, then try your luck again buying it online. You're really unlucky with your first one. Usually, it works for a few months before went that bad.
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