Financial Articles NewsFinancial Articles

While buying the battery for your laptop first of all you should pay attention to the manufacturer of the battery and its reputation. If battery is made by the manufacturer of your laptop (for example Sony, Dell, Compaq etc.), as a rule, you may be sure that this is a qualitative product. However many manufacturers actually do not make products independently, they are just branders. For example, if you disassemble genuine Sony laptop battery, you can find out that the power cells in this battery are actually made by Toshiba, Panasonic or any other company. Sony in this case simply made a plastic cover of the battery and put down its marking. Therefore any purchase of a "brand" battery does not mean yet that the quality of a product will be perfect.

At the same time many third party manufacturers use exactly the same cells as the original manufacturers. The purchase of the laptop battery of any third party manufacturer is frequently quite a good variant as it gives some extra advantages. For example, the price of many third party manufacturers’ batteries is much lower than that of the batteries of original manufacturers. Secondly, third party manufacturers give more favourable conditions of a guarantee since they understand that to convince the customer to buy their battery, they should be responsible for its quality. Never buy laptop batteries with a warranty period less than 6 months. It is known, that batteries can quickly fail, therefore the warranty period of 1-2 or 3 months does not promise you anything good.

The following important point, which the buyer should pay attention to is the battery type. Batteries can be made of different chemical elements. There are 4 basic types of batteries for laptops. These are Ni-MN, Ni-Cad, Li-Poly , Li-Ion. Nowadays there are no manufacturers that make Ni-Cad batteries because it is very old and rather primitive type of supply. Ni-MH technology is new and perfect, but it is also not as good as the laptop battery made according to Li-Ion and Li-Poly technologies. If to compare these three types (Li-Ion, Ni-MN, Li-Poly), Ni-MH battery is more heavy than the other two batteries and at the same time it has less volume. Li-Ion and Li-Poly are the most perfect types of batteries presented in the market and you should buy batteries of just that very type.

It is necessary to point out that many laptops which are sold with the certain type of the battery cannot be used with any other type of the battery. It means that if your laptop was sold with Ni-Cad battery it should be replaced with another Ni-Cad battery. The same situation is true for any other types of batteries.

And at last, you should pay attention to the power rating of the battery you buy. There are two characteristics for batteries: Volts and Amperes. As the batteries for laptops are much weaker, than, for example, car accumulators, many manufacturers display characteristics of batteries in Volts and microamperes. One thousand microamperes corresponds to one ampere. When you buy a battery, try to choose batteries with the greatest value of microamperes (mAh). Laptop batteries are also ranged according to Watt-Hours, perhaps, to the simplest characteristic in comparison with all the others. This value is defined as Volts and Amperes multiplication. The example below shows how to define the given value.

Thus it is 51.84 Watt-Hours battery. Term Watt Hour designates energy quantity necessary to power one watt for one hour. Thus the battery can power 51.84 watts within one hour. Let's admit that 25.92 watts are required to your laptop (it is doubtful whether the value will be such, but we take it for simplicity) then the given battery can feed your laptop for 2 hours. People often connect the word Watt with light bulbs. In this sense the given battery can feed 40 watt bulb for an hour and 15 minutes, and 60 watt bulb only for about 52 minutes, and 100 watt bulb for just about half an hour.

We wrote about Watt-Hours for the reason, that different laptop batteries have different Volt and Ampere characteristics. For example our laptop which uses Li-Ion of 14.4 Volts, 3600mAh battery can use Ni-MH battery of 9.6 Volts, 4000mAh. Let's count now, with what battery the laptop will work longer:

Li-Ion battery is more high-powered.

Are used batteries worth buying?

In general you should buy only new laptop batteries in which there are new cells. First such a battery will work one hundred per cent, secondly you will have guarantee on it. But companies often offer either only used and refurbished batteries or they give you a choice between new and used/refurbished batteries. The guarantee on such goods is minimum. If you do not use your laptop often and for a long time, such variant is quite suitable for you. It is possible to buy the second-hand battery instead of throwing out more than 100 dollars for a new one. But once again we will repeat. We recommend to buy only new batteries or to be very accurate while purchasing second-hand batteries.

Where to buy laptop battery?

There are a lot of electronic stuff resellers over net. One of the main things that you have to consider is whether the battery you have chosen is in stock right now (Avoid “on order” offers). Sometimes you can find a great price, but seller will ask you to wait a couple of days… then couple days more… and more. In fact, you could never receive your laptop battery. As for now we have had a good shopping experience with www.parts4NB.com shop. They have large variety of laptop battery, dell ac adapters and reasonable prices. If you are about buying a new laptop battery try to check with them.

And what to do with the old laptop battery?

A lot of people have have a question: what to do with the old battery, after purchasing a new one? We recommend contacting RBRC organisation (Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation). They can help to recycle your old laptop batteries.