Leaving computers on...and notebook batteries.

Andrew Burton wrote: Nah, that would be wasteful. Besides, sliced with some fresh mozzarella and basil, they're just too tasty. It's perfectly fine, and that's a better battery than the original. Come on now, it's for a notebook computer, do you expect it to be alkaline or zinc carbon? :-) Yup, give it a try. odds are it'll work just fine. Long as it fits, it should work. I have a similar replacement situation for my older macbook pro. Not made by apple, but I've tried it and it works just fine despite the higher mAh rating, just like yours. BTW, if you're not going to travel with the notebook much, you can still use the old battery even if it only lasts 5 minutes. In this case, it'll work as if it were a UPS. The reason I say this is that if you keep a battery in a notebook and you don't discharge it once in a while you'll find it will die pretty quickly. If you're going to travel around with it, use the new battery. Make sure you charge up the new battery before putting it away, and something like every 3-6 months you should pop it back in and recharge it. If the charge goes completely to zero (deep discharge) the battery is dead and will never be recoverable. I don't know about dells, or that particular one, but I killed the battery in my old macbook pro two years ago by leaving the machine on 24x7 for about a month (I was inbetween jobs, previously to that, the machine traveled with me). After that, it could barely hold half an hour - usually less, and it would power off before fully discharging - despite resetting the PMU and doing a few discharge/charge cycles. Odds are dells are better than this, for sure Thinkpads do not have this issue, but old Macbook pros with the swapable battery suffer from this. I've removed the battery from that machine completely now as I don't use it anywhere nearly as much. But every 3-6 months I recharge it and allow it to discharge, then recharge it again just to make sure I keep it alive.