24 Mar
2010
24 Mar
'10
8:41 a.m.
Andrew Burton wrote:
Now you see theres the other problem. This is an old
2nd-hand laptop and the
internal battery is all but gone - it lasts about 5 minutes after the laptop
as been switched on. When I got it the battery lasted about 40 minutes.
Foolishly, I got a replacement from China. I haven't used the replacement as
i) it looks suspicious too me (and being from China is probably fake/faulty)
and ii) the power ratings on it differ to my official battery and I wouldn't
want anything to happen to my laptop.
You could have mentioned this earlier and saved a lot of messages. :)
So how long does a "good battery" normally
last? I know modern laptops can
last up to 8 hours or so (assuming I'm not mis-remembering).
I remember older ones were about 2 hours or so. Depends on what kind of
notebook. You could google the original specs, it should tell you what
the battery life was like.
Meanwhile you could experiment and see how long it can sleep for before
it runs out or starts to hibernate.
Still, there shouldn't be anything preventing you from using the
hibernate feature as long as you've got enough disk space (and it has
the feature, and enable it - if I remember, with some flavors of that
odd OS from Redmond, you have to explicitly turn on a switch to enable it.)
If the voltage ratings are the same, and the pins for the battery are
the same and it fits, there's no reason not to try it. It might have a
larger capacity than the original. Just make sure the voltage is the same.