Laptop Battery: eBay vs Genuine/Original

[oldskooladdict]

My Dell Vostro 1700 battery is pretty bad now, I've had the Dell warning for a while that I need to replace it. The typical running time now is less than half an hour, making it not overly portable!

It's a big old beast and not exactly cutting edge - on the Dell site it seems a genuine battery will cost me £107 (that's reduced too with Dell's 20% off this week, yes, 107 reduced!)

On eBay a battery of claimed identical spec could be had for about 30 quid delivered, a considerable saving I'm sure you'd all agree.

BUT... is there any risk in purchasing a compatible battery rather than genuine? - I'm not overly bothered if it mean it's going to run down quicker and die quicker than a genuine one - as I said the laptop isn't a brilliant spec - 107 quid would be 1/4 of the original purchase price iirc and probably 1/2 the resale value if not less!

Thoughts guys?

[Hicks12]

well there is the risk of it blowing up and stuff by poor build quality but id say the risk is relatively low, its better if you could source a secondhand/refurbished battery though.... i managed to source a brand new 6 cell battery for my dell latitude e6400 for ~£40 so just look for the ebay shops etc, bound to have some around that area.

[desir0]

Yeah.

Cheap ebay batteries could leak/lose power.

I wouldn't risk it really.. but up to you.

[this_is_gav]

For our older laptops we sometimes use 'compatible' batteries, and to be honest, I've never had an issue with them. Indeed in one laptop series, the dreadful stock battery life (where they all started dying within a year) has been improved by using cheap compatibles.

I realise there is an element of risk in using cheaper compatible batteries, but personally I can't have any complaints from what I've seen so far.

That said, I know one Dell Vostro 1500 (one I bought for someone's personal use, not for work) with a compatible battery did complain about the battery when it was switched on, but as I remember it worked fine when you pressed whatever key it was to make the message go away.

[billythewiz]

The Asus battery in my laptop was so bad that it didn't work at all !! Whenever the power lead fell out, the laptop instantly shut down. A new, Asus branded battery is ~£90.

My laptop is about 3 years old so I could replace it with a brand new one of similar spec for ~£400.

So I got a battery off ebay for £35 delivered. It arrived, it went in, it worked .... nothing else to say.

I'll probably replace the laptop in 1-2 years so a £60 saving now will allow me to get one thats 10-15% more expensive

Or I could by 12 bottles of wine right now

Don't believe the FUD. Get one from ebay.

[Pob255]

I'd avoid 2nd hand batteries, also on older laptops it's often a better idea to avoid original batteries as well.

The problem is batteries lose total charge over time, regardless to if they are being used or not.
Often original batteries can be as old as the original laptop is, they've just been sitting in a warehouse all this time slowly losing capacity.

Also compatible batteries esp for older model laptops are using newer cheaper cells which can often account for a chunk of price.

Check your laptop, most of the dell "business" models have a quick swap optical drive and you can get a 2nd battery that goes in the drive bay instead to increase the running time.

[capt_cornflake]

I got a similar quote when the battery in my work laptop died last year. After a bit of bargaining, Dell eventually agreed to lower their price to sub-£50 (can't remember exactly).

A few months later a colleague with the same model had the same problem but Dell no longer stocked it (despite the model being less than 3 years old), and resorted to buying one on ebay.
It charged once and then died.

They may not all be bad, and you may be lucky, but it's far from guaranteed.

[oldskooladdict]

I'd avoid 2nd hand batteries, also on older laptops it's often a better idea to avoid original batteries as well.

The problem is batteries lose total charge over time, regardless to if they are being used or not.
Often original batteries can be as old as the original laptop is, they've just been sitting in a warehouse all this time slowly losing capacity.

Also compatible batteries esp for older model laptops are using newer cheaper cells which can often account for a chunk of price.

Check your laptop, most of the dell "business" models have a quick swap optical drive and you can get a 2nd battery that goes in the drive bay instead to increase the running time.

It's just a Vostro so I doubt it will have anything like that. I'll take a look though.

I see what you mean about the batteries just sitting around too, not good.

Hmm... I just use it plugged in most of the time now :/

[caliston]

As it happens I was doing some research on this today...

1. Lots of 'UK' eBay sellers and webshops with .co.uk domains are actually in China. For example,
batteries-man.co.uk says:

Address:
Berkeley Square House, Mayfair, London, W1J 6BD
(Please note that this is our warehouse address. No local pickup is available)

A warehouse in Mayfair? Yeah, right. Actually it's just a block of serviced offices with a mail forwarding service. They have lots of clones - just Google for "Please note that this is our warehouse address. No local pickup is available".

ukbattery.net has a UK address... it's a Chinese restaurant.

So read the descriptions really carefully. Note when they refer to sending things by USPS, or mention sales tax, or fail to give contact addresses and phone numbers. Try ringing the numbers and seeing if they work.

2. I was looking at cheap AA/C/D NiMH cells the other day. Chinese NiMHs have a habit of saying 3000mAh on the outside but turning out to be 500. Look at negative eBay feedback, you'll see this is a common occurrence for battery sellers including laptop batteries. There's nothing to say the battery isn't half filler to bulk out the weight. On eBay there's a pile of Chinese D cells that are a third of the price of the rest for the same advertised capacity... I'm suspicious.

3. My work bought me a new non-OEM battery for a laptop, which radically lost capacity after about 6-12 months. Much more so than the OEM battery. So you can't tell how it's going to behave on day one.

4. The battery may have a 1 year guarantee, but are you really going to send it back to China to claim? If the battery dies after the first month, are PayPal/eBay going to be interested?


and so on. Finding UK battery sellers is actually really hard. I did find laptopsandspares.com which does appear to be a genuine UK company with good feedback, though I haven't tried them. They're about twice the price of eBay, but at least you can hassle them if it doesn't work.

[dirky]

I used laptop-batteries.co.UK before when getting a clone for a work latitude or two

[jackvdbuk]

its a shame eally, i was looking for laptop batteries for both my XPS and aspire one, it seems the general consensus is that they often never contain the labeled charge, and rarely work for that long.

annoys me that officials are just so expensive!

[Paulus]

I got one off eBay (random shop - probably from China) for my Dell M1330 (a while ago now). Works fine and is identical to the original (apart from some branding). I feel like you have to try this at least once in your life

[badass]

Yeah.

Cheap ebay batteries could leak/lose power.

I wouldn't risk it really.. but up to you.

Or, if you use it as a laptop - as in sit it on your lap - blow your balls off in a white, extremely hot puff of smoke!
Personally, I'd not risk going el cheapo on ebay for li-ion batteries that will be anywhere near me