My trusty Dell laptop is now 3.5 years old and the batteries have basically died at this point. The extra battery for the drive bay (slide DVD out, slide extra battery in, enjoy several more hours of unplugged goodness) can’t be charged while the primary battery only lasts for an hour or so.

A quick search shows that the batteries are insanely expensive. Roughly, they cost 120€ each, 240€ total, which is around $350! (yeah, this is mostly due to the weak dollar, but still). For comparison, the laptop cost me around 2500€ at the time (it was top of the line and that’s why I can still comfortably use it today) so the new batteries would be 10% of that price.

I wasn’t ready to pay that much so I turned to eBay. Guess what – I found the same batteries, brand new, for a quarter of the price. Both were about 64€ with shipping from Hong Kong.  As expected, the batteries do not have Dell official sticker, but are for all intents and purposes identical to the ones I already have. You can see the ID and serial number of the primary battery on the screenshot.

The new primary battery lasted almost 4 hours yesterday, exactly what it should for light Internet browsing, news reading etc. I had LCD brightness to the max, Wi-Fi on and an external hard drive attached so I wasn’t really saving power.

I guess that the batteries sold by other “official” sources still come from the same group of vendors as this one, except that they have “official” sticker (Dell’s or somebody else’s). I don’t like paying for branding and I’m extremely happy with my purchase.

A few sites on the Internet show you how to replace the actual batteries inside the laptop packaging. This is a slightly tricky process that requires soldering and careful manipulation of the battery package (so that it can fit back into the laptop), not to mention the possibility to fry the battery and/or laptop if mishandled. With batteries as cheap as this, there’s no need to opt for do-it-yourself whatsoever.