Am I the only one who’s laptop battery just plain gave up on me? I thought we were having a grand relationship. I charged it fully, let it drain fully, charged it fully, I thought I was being the ideal battery user person. I’m at the point now where my battery lasts 20 minutes on a full charge if I’m lucky. While I appreciate the emails from people concerned my battery could explode, I seriously doubt this thing has the power to light LED’s little on start a fire.

Options? Pay the man $170 for a new one, and yes in this context dell is the man. Another somewhat viable option is this generic battery for $50. It’s clunky at 3.5 lbs but has some nice features including the claim it can be charged 1000 times.

The biggest negative is that it doesn’t physically fit into the laptop so it’s far from ideal. As well, as it’s going through the laptop’s AC input, my machine won’t know when the battery’s about to die leaving me open to data loss. I can get around this by using my original fully charged battery as my failsafe. That’d give me a full 10 to 20 minutes to save my important solitaire game after the generic battery died.

It’s cumbersome but at least I could go back to working at the park the odd day.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 9:57 am and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.