[ale] [OT] Laptop Battery Worth It?

[Pat Regan]

On Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:22:24 -0400
David Tomaschik <david at systemoverlord.com> wrote:

> A new battery would be ~$150 shipped from System 76.  3rd party
> suppliers from eBay can be had for about $75.  The laptop is in mostly
> good condition, though the screen occasionally flickers, but closing
> and reopening the screen has fixed it thus far.  (I've tried reseating
> the video ribbon cable, but the problem persists.)

In the past I've been quite mean to laptop batteries.  I once punished
a Dell 9 cell battery so badly that my runtime dropped from 3.5+ hours
down to less than 1.5 hours in less than a years worth of use.

That said, I've been buying my replacement batteries exclusively from
ebay for years.  Some of the batteries I've bought have started with a
slightly higher mAh rating and runtime than the original batteries.

I didn't keep track of charge cycles and runtime, but the third party
batteries didn't seem to survive as many charge cycles as the
manufacturers batteries.

If the ebay batteries are half the cost of the manufacturer's
batteries, I would expect that to be a good value.

> Does it seem reasonable to spend $75-$150 on this laptop, or is it
> throwing money away?  Does anyone have experience with 3rd party
> battery suppliers on eBay they'd like to share?
> 

You got a lot of good advice on this already, but I'll throw in my two
cents.

There's a good laptop on sale for $400 or less at least once every
month.  Woot.com had a nice looking dual core 17.3 inch HP laptop for
$370 last month (maybe 2 months ago).  Last year we bought a dual core
15.6 inch Ideapad G550 for around $400.

There's a deal on a similar Ideapad right now for $360 shipped:

http://dealspl.us/Laptop_deals/p_new-lenovo-g560-067999u-15-6-notebook

Pat