Just Laptop Battery.com

With the battery being such an integral component of a notebook computer, the cost of the laptop battery can have a noticeable effect on the cost of the entire notebook.

Reuters reports that Dell announced this week that there was a shortage of laptop batteries because in part of a fire at a major laptop battery manufacturer - LG Chem.

Dell also admitted that prices for laptop batteries sold separately from a notebook system have gone up because of the shortage. LG Chem, one of the leading makers of batteries for laptops, had a fire in its Ochang plant on March 3. Dell says that it is working with other vendors to obtain batteries in an attempt to stave the shortage and prevent price increases for new notebooks from being passed on to consumers.

Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn told Reuters,

“We sell battery packs. The prices of those battery packs for people ordering extra batteries have gone up.”

However, Blackburn didn’t comment on the amount of the price increase.

Dell isn’t the only PC maker looking at laptop battery shortages; Hewlett Packard is feeling the same pinch. Hewlett-Packard spokesperson Mike Hockey said,

“The full extent of the impact to Hewlett Packard and other OEMs is still being determined. We are aggressively working within the battery cell industry to secure additional supply of battery cells.”

Source: DailyTech.com

Dell laptop battery stores:

• JustLaptopBatteries.com
• LaptopPartsWorld.com
• HQBatteries.com

There are many ways to go about buying laptops now-a-days. Pretty much what this means is that many different people buy used laptops. Whenever you go to buy a used laptop, one of the main things that you are going to worry about is the quality of the battery. Testing laptop batteries is one of the best things that you can do before you buy a laptop, and if you are not able to you should test it as soon as you get it. If a laptop has a bad battery that does not mean that you should not get it (because you can just buy a new one). But it’s good to know if you are going to need to get a new one or not.

There are many different ways of testing laptop batteries. If you look around online you will see that many different people test their batteries in many different ways. However, either way you choose to test your battery, you want to have something running. Many people think that they can just turn on the laptop and let it sit there. Then after a hour or so they come back and see if the laptop is still on. This is not testing your laptop battery. You have to have the computer running something, and it helps if it’s using the CD-ROM drive as well. The more things that it has going on it at once will let you see if the computer can hold a charge. After testing the computer you will be able to make a good choice on whether you would like to keep the battery that you have or if you are going to need a new one. Please keep in mind if you buy a new computer you should aways fully charge the battery first before using the computer. Otherwise you could damage the laptop battery.

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LG Electronics has offered free replacement batteries after two users claimed that their notebook PCs exploded. Despite the recall offer, LG has so far described the incidents as “isolated “. The partial recall applies to batteries manufactured by LG Chemical for two recent laptop models, the LG Z1 and LG Z2.

Video shot in January showed a journalist’s LG Z1-AE007 notebook burning and then exploding.

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Mitch Bartlett has written in several times before with tips and tricks. They are always excellent advice. This time, he is giving me a few pointers about extending the life of my battery in my laptop. I wanted to share these with you.

Whenever you get a laptop one of the first things you want to know is how good is the laptop batteries that it has. Well unless you buy a real top-of-the-line laptop, the battery is probably not going to be that great. Of course worry not, because you can buy better laptop batteries online or at stores. I have never had a laptop that had a great battery to start with, but after buying some laptop batteries online I found that this is the way to go. This way you can spend as little or as much as you want on your laptop batteries. Some of the laptop batteries can cost a lot to almost nothing, but remember that you get what you pay for.

Buying laptop batteries is not something that has to be hard, however, it seems like if you buy them online you can get a better deal than you can buying them in stores. I think this is because you can compare prices to other stores online. It is hard to run around town comparing different laptop batteries. Not only are you not going to save very much money, but after all the driving around your savings will be eaten up buy gas prices. Of course, I think that is why I like to buy everything online, and this includes laptop batteries.

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A whole desktop computer is equivalent to a laptop and I suppose the reason why laptops are preferred instead of desktop computers is because of their mobility which is only possible through laptop batteries. The portable machine can be moved around from one place to another without going through any hassle. Due to the laptop batteries, the machine is ideal for businessmen and college or university students to make their presentations, projects, business dealings and assignments while having a combine study at a friend’s place or colleague. Thanks to the laptop batteries, light weighted and their miniature size, life is now easier than it used to be.

A notebook computer which is completely correspondent to a desktop computer is always preferred for multiple reasons. First there is the fact of a laptop being portable which is ideal for students and businessmen for their daily assignments or presentations respectively. Now with wireless internet connection you can stay logged on to the internet at all times from everywhere and anywhere. The touchpad on the laptop is used as a mouse and the compact keyboard is great and comfortable for typing. Just for the reason that a laptop is small in size does not mean that the comfort of using a laptop is compromised. The best feature that keeps laptop in the spotlight no matter what kind of modern desktop computers is in the market is laptop batteries that make mobility possible in the first place.

Earlier when laptops were new to the market and was still being experimented to make them even better for use, nickel-cadmium laptop batteries were used. But due to being temperature sensitive and highly expensive the use of them was substituted by lithium-ion batteries. These batteries are also temperature sensitive but can resist a lot more heat than nickel-cadmium batteries in addition they are not that expensive making the prices of laptops affordable. Now if you are planning on purchasing a laptop batteries here are a few things that should be considered. First of all make sure that the battery is new and original as used or counterfeit laptop batteries may be cheap but will be a waste of money due to their short life and flimsiness.

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Laptop PCs need longer battery life. I used a flash-disk based laptop for much of the ’90s and loved its 10-hour laptop battery life. You just have so much more freedom when you don’t need to worry about keeping a laptop battery charged.

I’ve been very interested in how flash drives could extend notebook battery life. Using a Kill-a-watt power meter I ran some experiments with an Intel Core Duo notebook. Power use is a little more complex than I’d thought. Here’s what I found.

Laptop config:

• MacBook with the 2 GHz Core Duo,
• 2 GB RAM,
• Intel 950 integrated graphics,
• 13 inch screen,
• 8x DVD Drive,
• 160 GB Western Digital Scorpio 2.5″ 5400 RPM HDD,
• Bluetooth,
• Wi-FI

One of the nicest things about the MacBook is that disk drive removal is easy (see the 1 minute video here). I ran the tests with the internal Scorpio drive removed and ran the MacBook off an externally powered FireWire drive.

Instrumentation
In addition to the Kill-a-watt power meter, which sits between the wall power and the MacBook’s power adapter, I also used the most excellent open source MenuMeters utility. MM shows CPU, memory, disk and network usage, typically sampled over a user-selectable 1-2 second period…

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We intentionally created conditions in which the Li-ON battery pack would explode inside a generic portable. The results are dramatic. There are numerous conditions where these fires can occur in real life. Faulty battery packs (driving the recalls), faulty protection circuits inside the PC, exposure to excessive heat, and blunt force are some of the major ways that this could happen to you.

Video source: Pcpitstop.com

While the portability of laptops is the main reason they’ve grown increasingly popular, that portability comes a price, namely rechargeable batteries. Not only do these batteries limit how long you can use the computer away from a power outlet, they gradually lose their ability to hold a charge.

Battery Health Monitor: Another freeware option, not quite as pretty as CoconutBattery, but gives you most of the same information. Battery Health Monitor has a grid at the top that shows you the power status of the laptop. When plugged in, the word “A/C Power” is bold for example; when on battery power, the word is grayed out.

Other indicators include “Battery Depleted” and “Not Chargeable,” neither of which you’ll want to see bolded. Battery Health Monitor also tells you how many charge cycles the battery has gone through as well as the current voltage the battery is delivering.

SlimBatteryMonitor: This piece of freeware is essentially a fancy replacement for Apple’s laptop battery icon.

While it does not provide any of the supplemental data the other options do, SlimBatteryMonitor’s main attraction is that it takes up less space in the menu bar than Apple’s built-in version and is much more customizable, particularly in the colors you can choose for the battery icon…

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Wow! It’s Wednesday’s IT Blogwatch: in which we’re really, really excited about a notebook battery that lasts 30 years. Not to mention an awful, awful performance from Commander Riker hawking enterprise IT automation software…

A breathless Next Energy News reports:

Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.
…
Betavoltaics generate power when an electron strikes a particular interface between two layers of material. The Process uses beta electron emissions that occur when a neutron decays into a proton which causes a forward bias in the semiconductor. This makes the betavoltaic cell a forward bias diode of sorts, similar in some respects to a photovoltaic (solar) cell. Electrons scatter out of their normal orbits in the semiconductor and into the circuit creating a usable electric current… [more]

Addy Dugdale digs it:

Made from radioactive material … the batteries end their life being completely inert and non-toxic, so they’re not as scary-bad as they sound … Before you all run for the tinfoil, the batteries don’t use fission or fusion, nor are there any chemical processes to produce energy, which means no radioactive or hazardous waste … Small and thin, the batteries use a porous silicon material to collect the hydrogen isotope tritium that is generated in the process. And as it’s a non-thermal reaction, your laptop will stay cooler than if its juice came from traditional lithium-ion batteries… [more]

Rupert Goodwins, the first ever blogger scoffs:

Sadly, no. As with the best techno-rubbish, there is a story in there, but you’ll be pootling around the skies in jetpacks before you’re powering your Dell from neutron decay.
…
Tritium’s half-life is around twelve years, so every decade or so your battery will halve in power … the sort of atomic structures that generate power when bombarded with high energy electrons are the sort that tend to fall apart when bombarded with high energy electrons … there’s the small problem that if you break the battery during its life the nasties come out … they don’t have a great conversion efficiency. Around 25 percent is the best you can get - which is pretty good, but leaves 75 percent sloshing around as heat. That means a 25 watt battery will get plenty warm … Even the latest devices, which are very clever in the way they saturate a porous structure with the gas and thus usefully capture quite a large number of the energetic electrons, have an energy density of the order of twenty five watts per kilo. Lithium ion batteries, the sort you have in your laptop, manage 1.8 kilowatts per kilo… [more]

Full story ComputerWorld.com