Just ordered a laptop battery online from a site with an overly specific name and the Paypal name was ‘Honest Electronics Corp.’

I am slightly nervous about the quality of goods I may end up with.

(NB the thread title was going to be Russian Roulette but most batteries good and bad seem to be made in China so I changed it – not meaning to be derogatory in any way about Chinese manufacturing capability)

i have bought some random stuff from the far east and some of the company names have been funny. The quality has varied massively… batterys normally seem to be good on the whole, just they generally over state their charge giving figures twice as high as anyone else in the universe and the like but the batteries have normally been fine from most suppliers i have used.

Just had my second laptop battery from Hong Kong die and no warranty forthcoming. electronics-home.co.uk for information in case anyone else wants to avoid these charlatans.

Blame myself though – buy cheap buy twice as they say. Hope you have better luck with honest-electronics corp.

mmmm.

mmmm.

Well you might be lucky.

From my experience most laptop batteries are made up of 18650 batteries in series and parallel. The same stuff the once popular DX torches ran on!

Anyway – there are good and bad, and all inbetween. You’ve probably just bought around 10 x 18650 cells with a control board.

Save and back up everything!

I bought a new Ebay battery for my NetBook and it somehow managed to reformat it. Works perfectly now though so not all bad.

It was hplaptopbattery.co.uk which is clearly a front for some other organisation. The site seemed reasonable (no ludicrous claims) and they had actually listed useful information like a description of how much the extended capacity battery protrudes from the bottom of the laptop etc. It wasn’t the cheapest either, eBay had them for £20 and this was £45. It claims to be made from Panasonic cells, whatever that’s worth.

Well, it came. It works. It doesn’t seem very good though. First half goes in about half an hour, the last 15% seems to vanish immediately. I get about 3 mins after the first battery low warning before it hibernates. I get maybe 90 mins of runtime in total if I am lucky out of it. The original was 2-3 hours depending.

Hmph.

Do you not need to install some funny software to change the way that your computer knows what the battery capacity is and where the thresholds are? I remember having to do that on my Sony before it would measure properly

you do need to calibrate the laptop/battery

however, it may just be a shit battery.