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I got quoted some 150 Euro for the battery for my Dell Latitude D600. Ebay is full of them from £30 up to £150 and they all look the same. So what's the difference?
Suppose the manufacturer will have put more time and effort into finding a reliable, repeatable, matched set of cells with guaranteed funtion etc. Ebay £30 ones will be the cheapest cells anyone can ram into a pack and the capacity claim will be unlikely to be correct.
Prices are insane though.
You'll go through 5 of the ebay ones in the same time as you would one of the official one. I did with my think pad one anyway.
Could be a good or bad thing depending if you have the 150quid lying around.....you could look at the bay ones as a way of paying in installments 🙂
More hassle than they are worth if you ask me......I'm not sure how safe they are either, with all the recent events of Sony etc having trouble with batteries bursting into flames i don't think anyone is completely safe but the Chinese ones probably care less.
...or the manufacturer could be trying to squeeze every last penny out of a captive market (and have much higher overheads to cover), and the ebay ones could be the real price. I've bought several £30 ebay Dell battery packs in order to use the cells in my homebrew light projects, and they've all been good cells of claimed capacity (can't vouch for the other electronics which come with them). Then again, I'm sure at least some of those were official packs just bought outside the usual supply chain.
Dell overcharge (pun unintended!) for everything aftermarket. Go for the Ebay ones. There's probably genuine Dell batteries on there anyway. Especially for old models like the D600
Just get 18650 batterys from DX and do it [url= http://www.fonerbooks.com/laptop_3.htm ]yourself.[/url]
Genuine batteries and chargers are priced to leave you with a sore bottom pretty much across the board, it's not solely a Dell trait.
Third party power can be a mixed bag. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't.
As lightman says, rebuilding is a far more attractive option if you know one end of a soldering iron from another.
Or befriend someone who does! Maybe another market for Smudge to branch out into?
Rebuilding seems easy but almost as costly, hmmm....
We've previously bought replacement Dell batteries from blackcatpc on ebay. These claim to be genuine (and we haven't had any reason to doubt that), aren't silly / generic cheap, but are cheaper than buying direct from Dell.
My Dad bought one off ebay and it didn't last long. Mind you the original (Dell) only lasted about 6 months anyway.