Laptop Batteries - Literal Ticking Time Bombs

[LifeAlert]

Picture this: you're a laptop user. Some years have passed since you dropped money on the latest and greatest gaming laptop. However, you start to notice the battery draining faster and faster. You plug it in and wait a while, only to find that it never charged to 100%. Suddenly, you feel the keyboard start to push upward and keys start flying everywhere! Your touchpad has exploded chestburster-style and your laptop starts whistling like a kettle while bouncing around as if it were chattering teeth. Next thing you know, BOOM! You hear a loud, gut wrenching noise from the battery compartment - as Plebbit would say, you now have a "spicy pillow". It's over.

You dial emergency services and get the computer repair shop on the phone immediately. You have the ambulance take your expensive, fat, smoke-smelling loved one to the repairman as soon as possible. It's an emergency, they're stepping on it, and they have sirens blaring. You follow them to the shop, give them the rundown, pay upfront, and wait agonizing hours for the operation to finish. The repairman steps out. Good news! Your daily driver is back to working order and everything is okay. Except...

"We couldn't source an original replacement battery, so we just installed a third-party we had on hand."

Wait, what? What does this mean? You are reassured that the new battery will work fine. Cautiously optimistic, you take the laptop back home, start it up, and everything works as it should...for about a month.

Then it happens again: the power drain, the incomplete charging, and the fear of imminent disaster. You hop online and start looking up replacement batteries. You find post after post about how all of the replacements are unreliable, shitty, cheaply made Chinesium crap that are nothing more than ticking time bombs, and how you should buy OEM ones because they're slightly better. You look online at all the usual places. There aren't any OEM ones left, except for heavily used pre-owned ones that have already inflated, as the seller hopes for the next poor schmuck to take it off his hands. With no other choice, you look for a reliable third-party battery. You research every brand, every listing, every company. They all produce the same result: boom.

There is an open secret among laptop owners, an elephant in the room, a quiet part that hasn't been said out loud; each and every portable computer has a ticking time bomb inside of it that is designed to fail and is counting the days until it stops powering your device or outright kills it and, if you aren't careful, may seriously injure you or worse. All available replacement batteries are even more poorly designed than what is included by the manufacturer. This is commonly accepted in the tech world, and no one bats an eye. Sure, a handful of people may question why this is, but ultimately they are screaming into the void as the majority are content with the status quo and no effort is made to enforce any kind of quality control on vital components for maintaining electronics.

What are your views, thoughts and opinions about replacement batteries? Do you have a laptop/phone battery horror story? What do you think can be done to solve this problem or improve the state of things in the battery world?

 

[Combustion Engine]

What are your views, thoughts and opinions about replacement batteries?

I wish they'd just let me stick my own fucking 18650s into them, because I at least know I won't stick e-vape salvage timebombs that have lost most of their capacity already into them like chinks do, can't trust them even if you want to pay good money. And if it uses pouch batteries, it can go fuck itself, I'd rather have a massive brick than those barely functional and repairable shiny toys. Lenovo blowing fuses/bricking their Thinkpad line batteries if you try to replace them and aren't aware of it (and, additionally, manage to even open it up) will forever annoy me.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

get the computer repair shop on the phone immediately.

It takes fifteen minutes and a single Phillips screwdriver to change the battery on my laptop. If you need to hire a specialist to do that, how do you manage day-to-day?

 

[break these cuffs]

I have replaced a number of batteries and they're all fine. They will have some quirks, but some have been used for years and still work fine. OEMs, if I can find, them have cost as much as the laptop itself is worth. None of these are gayming laptops because buying one of those is actually retarded. You're paying the cost of a top end gaming pc to have something that will be hot, loud, neutered, and as you noted, destined to fail.

If you need a laptop for class, watching streams, or whatever then just buy something used from a reputable electronics recycler for like $250. I have a couple for running programing software on a native OS that will brick hardware if you run it in a VM.

 

[The Connected Nose]

None of these are gayming laptops because buying one of those is actually retarded.

Also the battery on a "gaming" laptop is essentially a built-in UPS. It was never meant to actually run the thing other than carrying it between outlets in the house, or keeping the RAM alive in sleep mode. Because, as you said, such laptops are gay.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

If you need a laptop for class, watching streams, or whatever then just buy something used from a reputable electronics recycler for like $250.

My dad has a small business that requires a lot of travel and laptop usage. I turned him on to used business laptops on Ebay a few years ago - he started buying them two at a time so he always has a spare and STILL pays way less than he used to for brand-new ones.

 

[Poggers Booty Hole]

Framework solves this problem and similar assuming the company keeps on existing.

 

[CEO of Autism]

Can you guys live in the real world for once and not dramatize everything?

I've been using laptops for decades. I'm fine.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Wouldn't know, don't really care. My "gayming" laptop stays plugged in 99% of the time.

 

[PovertySprocket]

Laptop batteries are under-specced by design to achieve a smaller overall package. Advertised battery runtime is never accurate, especially not under a constant full-tilt load (like a video game).

 

[⚞⛇⚟]

I have really considered abandoning the laptop's internal battery entirely and hooking it up to a external battery. Has anyone else tried that, and how did it go?

 

[The Rat KIng]

Lenovo blowing fuses/bricking their Thinkpad line batteries if you try to replace them and aren't aware of it (and, additionally, manage to even open it up) will forever annoy me.

haven't worked on any of the newer Thinkpads, is that a newer thing cause I have never had an issue with lenovos. Only thing similar I've ever had was a backlight fuse blow (lcd screen) and it still ran fine, just no screen.

 

[#lurker]

Stop charging batteries to 100% like a retard.

 

[Combustion Engine]

haven't worked on any of the newer Thinkpads, is that a newer thing cause I have never had an issue with lenovos. Only thing similar I've ever had was a backlight fuse blow (lcd screen) and it still ran fine, just no screen.

These. In many (most, all?) old thinkpad external batteries it blows up during re-cell if you don't know about it beforehand, presumably other lines as well. OEM batteries are only manufactured for a brief period of time and will inevitably have much less capacity left by the time you need to replace your own(s), and like someone said in this thread they end up being more expensive than the laptop itself at times, so if you want that endurance back you either do it yourself or trust chinese sweatshops that you can't easily audit. Internal pouch are the worst, third-party are something I'm not confident putting into anyone else's laptop, OEMs are expensive and they're often unique to one specific laptop model/manufacturing year (even if they don't have to, but companies like Apple really love making sure spare parts are unusable on other models even with simple tricks like putting a plastic notch in some place, without going into firmware whitelists).

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Reminds me of an old comic

 

[The Rat KIng]

These. In many (most, all?) old thinkpad external batteries it blows up during re-cell if you don't know about it beforehand, presumably other lines as well. OEM batteries are only manufactured for a brief period of time and will inevitably have much less capacity left by the time you need to replace your own(s), and like someone said in this thread they end up being more expensive than the laptop itself at times, so if you want that endurance back you either do it yourself or trust chinese sweatshops that you can't easily audit. Internal pouch are the worst, third-party are something I'm not confident putting into anyone else's laptop, OEMs are expensive and they're often unique to one specific laptop model/manufacturing year (even if they don't have to, but companies like Apple really love making sure spare parts are unusable on other models even with simple tricks like putting a plastic notch in some place, without going into firmware whitelists).

ahh, my bad. I've never done a re-cell (surprisingly, I've done tube amp tinkering bare handed) most the laptop I own were already old so less hours was just expected and I usually just keep them plugged in to wall, using them more like a portable PC than a laptop.

 

[BradeRunna]

Just bought a refurbished T480 ThinkPad for $235 off Amazon a month ago. I bought a replacement external and internal battery for it. The external is OEM and was $100. I bought this $40 internal off Amazon and it was defective. I bought another one for $100 and had no issues with it yet. It was from a company called Laptop Battery Express and they claimed they tested the battery themselves. I cleaned the keyboard with the alcohol wipes because I have done that with every keyboard I have ever owned and they keys started to turn white. It was so bad I couldn't see the letters and numbers on the keys well. Found out it was a cheap Chinese replacement for that model series of ThinkPad so I bought an OEM keyboard new in the box for $90.

I opened up the laptop myself replaced the internal battery. cleaned the inside out with some compressed air. Removed the heatsink on the CPU cleaned the old hard thermal paste off with alcohol wipes. Reapplied some new MX-4 thermal paste that won't get hard reinstalled the heatsink but I cleaned it out first with compressed air. I made sure to hold the fan so the speed of the air wouldn't damage it. I popped the cover back on. Replaced the external battery. Then replaced the keyboard and put the screws back into the back of the laptop.

Like a boss.

 

[Overwritten Tapes]

I ruined my replacement battery (I think) by always keeping the thing plugged in. I thought I ruined the original by letting it drain and not charging it for extended periods at a time. Maybe the replacement was trash already.

 

[Le b0wski]

I have really considered abandoning the laptop's internal battery entirely and hooking it up to a external battery. Has anyone else tried that, and how did it go?

Some of the newer ones will run off a 65w+ usb c charger with the battery disconnected, some you might have to bridge something inside trick it into thinking a battery is plugged in. No real reason you couldn't run it from a large powerbank, repurposed ebike battery or whatever.

 

[BeckhoffAX5702]

I ruined my replacement battery (I think) by always keeping the thing plugged in. I thought I ruined the original by letting it drain and not charging it for extended periods at a time. Maybe the replacement was trash already.

Replacement batteries are always hit or miss in my experience, both knockoff Chinese (read Amazon) and dedicated third party manufacturer batteries. So no, sometimes you just have bad luck.

Spoiler: Battery shenanigans

Didn't have luck with 3 aftermarket batteries for my Elitebook 8770W and Latitude E6540, but a friend had me replace his battery for a Dell Precision and that thing lasted the full 4 years of college.