REVIEW: Chinese Laptop Battery from eBay
Ever wonder about those cheap laptop batteries on eBay?
Well I needed a new battery for my old IBM Thinkpad X24 Notebook, so I ordered one listed as a
4.8A LAPTOP BATTERY Fr IBM ThinkPad X20 X21 X22 X23 X24
Seller: manufacturerbattery2
(NOTE: I do not give a direct link as that will not be useful after awhile)
But first I sent them and email asking them to confirm that it was a 4800 milliamphour battery. Their response was,
Dear graywolfphoto,
Thank you for your inquiry.
Our this model of battery is 4800mah.
6 cells and a half year warranty, if you receive the battery in a month, it
has some quality of problem , i can replace a new one to you.
Our battery of quality is reliable, so you can trust it.
Meanwhile i will try my best to service for you.
I will ship battery usps (postal service)
Feel freeo contact with us if you have any request.
My email:sell@yock-asia.com
Have a good weekend!
Best regards.
–manufacturerbattery2
So after 26 days I receive it in the mail. The first thing I notice about it is that Chinese Plastic Smell. The second it that it does not fit quite as well as the factory battery being just a bit tight and requiring a bit more force than I was really comfortable with to snap it into the laptop. It very clearly says 4800mah on it. So I plug it in and let it charge for 24 hours (Yes, I know the charging circuit shuts off long before that, but they always tell you to do that). Even after 24 hours the charge light is still blinking.
A bit of an aside to explain how the Thinkpad’s charging circuit works with the factory battery. The LED shows green above 80%, Amber below that. Charging it shows Amber up to 80% then blinking green until fully charged. At 98% it drops to a low trickle charge until completely charged when the LED goes to a steady green. These, by the way, are Smart Batteries and and this is all determined by the onboard computer.
Next I setup a Calibrate battery profile that simply does nothing, allowing the laptop to run down continuously until the battey shuts it off. Then I unplugged it and waited for it to shut off. Which happened 2.5 hours later. That was not much more than the factory battery was still doing even though it was down to 50% of capacity. However I was not too worried about that as you usually have to do a few calibration runs to get a new battery and the laptop into calibration and giving the full capacity of the new battery.
However, I was still worried about that blinking LED never going out. I emailed the seller about that and they told me to download a copy of batterymon.exe from the web, and send them a screen shot of the battery information from it. In the meantime I had done another discharge/charge cycle. That time the battery went four hours (note that is at an idle with nothing running on the computer). That is about what I expected.
With batterymon.exe running here is the info shot from the next run,
Things to note are the Design Capacity, Full Charge Capacity, and Current Capacity, this will be interesting later on. You will also notice that the battery is discharging at a rate of about 11 watts.
I noticed on the discharge chart that the battery shut down at about 15%, but the notebook shut off before I could get a screen shot. For the next run I set the computer to hibernate at 3% and it managed to do that so I was able to recover the chart that time.
In that screen shot above you can see where the battery cuts off at 12-13%. The discharge rate is higher in that run because I got impatient and did repeated virus scans to simulate normal usage which gave 2.5 hours which is not too bad for and older notebook of this type.
Next we look at the battery supposedly fully charged.
Now, wait a minute, that looks strange.
Yes, it does what we are seeing here is the battery cutting off charging at about 91%. Furthermore, it had been trickle charging from 80%. Something stinks in Denmark, err… I mean China.
Lets look at an info shot.
Here we are seeing the battery after three cycles. It says 100% charged, zero charging rate. But compare the capacity ratings to the first shot.. Yes Design Capacity is down from 5240 to 4804 milliamp hours, and Full Charge Capacity is down from 4229 to 3876mah. Current capacity is also 3876. I figure that the SMART BATTERY is learning that that 91% above is full charge. If this keeps up the capacity will go down with each charge cycle. Let’s look and see if it does.
This is after another cycle. Note the capacities. Design and Full are the same as in the previous cycle but Current Capacity is down from 3876 to 3645. It shows 94%, but notice the Charge Rate is Zero so it is for all intents and purposes fully charged.
At that point I stopped cycling the battery as I am going to have to get what use I can out of it. I figure that will be about six months which coincidendently is when the warrenty ends. What does the seller, who appears to actually be Yock Batteries, the manufacturer, say about this?
Dear sir,
Our engineer saw your pictures , he said the battery can discharge and charge normally.
So we think you can use our battery well.
If you have any request, please email to me.
Thanks in advance.
Best regards.
So why do they not have a lot of negative feedback (I did give them a negative)? Most likely because all most buyers notice is that it charges and discharges which it does quite well, by the time the poor programming of the onboard computer causes the battery to die it is too late. Being a tech, when the run time gets low enough to be annoying I will take the cells out of this and put them into the old battery case and use the factory electronics. That means I think the actually cells are OK, it is the implementation that is bad. Probably just the programming.
CONCLUSION: Pass on these.
NOTE: It isn’t buying direct from China that is bad, it is buying a Yock battery even from a local dealer.
ADDENDUM: (7/25/2008) I ran another cycle, and as I expected batterymon now shows fully charge to be 3645mah. That is only 3/4 the capacity they claimed and I expect it to get worse.
Battery Poor
I am battery poor. There are batteries all over the apartment. I have AAA, AA, D, 9volt, laptop, PDA, Cel-phone, camera, shaver, UPS, and who knows what other kinds of batteries. At the moment I am awaiting a new laptop battery that is somewhere between here and China, and a UPS battery that has apparently not yet been shipped while they have had my money in hand for over a week. The Toshiba Pocket PC needs a new battery, in fact it needs a new Pocket PC as the top line on the screen has been dead for a year or more.
The sound level meter needs a new 9 volt. Both smoke detectors are due new batteries, a pair of 9 volt each. Most likely the digital multimeter needs a new 9 volt as well. I know the transmitter for the wireless head phones does. Who knows what else is sucking up 9 volt batteries that I can not remember at the moment.
One wireless mouse uses AAA and the other AA, why can those guys not make up their mind? The wireless headphones mentioned above use AAA. It seems like they could have use the same kind of batteries in the transmitter and the headphones, but, oh no, that would be too easy. The beard trimmer uses two AA’s, at least that is better than the old one that used three. I hate devices that use three batteries. The batteries come in four packs, so you put in three and might as well throw the other out because you are never going to remember where you put it. I sometimes think the battery manufacturers must pay companies to use three batteries in stuff.
It is hard to think of all the stuff that uses AA cells around here. From flash lights to strobes, mice to keyboards; I admit I would be happier if every thing used AA’s it would simplify logistics a lot. Then there are the D cells, like the flashgun on the Speed Graphic, the big Maglight in the car, the boombox in the bedroom, and of course the cassette field recorders.
The rechargable drill needs new nicad battery packs but I do not think you can even get those anymore. The shaver uses wired in nicads as does the oscilloscope. The old thinkpad uses NiMH but I do not think it is worth replacing those, the new one is, as I mentioned, awaiting a new battery from Shanghai.
Aaaah, why go on? Most of you are in the same situation and know it as well as I.