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IBM 600 Series Laptops and Flaky Batteries?
netdemonboberb asks:
"I don't know where else we should turn, because no site will write articles on [this subject] and IBM is denying that their IBM 600 series laptops have flaky batteries. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute distributed these laptops to freshman students in 1999 and almost everyone I knew in my class had this issue. Ralph Levien's page has suggested it appears to be an issue with the 'Smart Monitoring' circuitry.
I'm writing this article to get the issue out in the open so IBM can no longer deny it. These batteries are expensive, and I have had to replace mine 4 times already. Can anyone who reads/maintains slashdot help or provide any advice on getting resolution for this?" I must say that from personal experience, I've wondered if this might be the case as well. I have an IBM Thinkpad 600e laptop and I've already gone through 2 batteries. The laptop is currently inactive as it must be tied to the wall if it is to be used. Has anyone else experienced shorter-than-average battery life using these laptops? Were you able to do anything to improve the battery life?
I have an old Fujitsu from 1996 that still holds a good charge, but I also have an IBM thinkpad that someone gave me, I'm guessing it's about a 1998 or 1999 model and the battery is stone dead.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
I've got a 560 and used it mainly connected to the mains. My battery died very fast as it seems the TP would keep the battery topped up even if you was using mains power. Upgrading to the latest BIOS fixed the problem but I still had to shell out for a new battery (as mentioned, not cheap).
These laptops are 3-4 years old. Laptop batteries last 1-2 years under moderate use, less if you recharge more often (Heavily used ones last under 6 months sometimes).
Where's the problem?
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
If this is as widespread as it would appear, it's just a matter of time before someone works up the nerve to file a class action lawsuit. If I were you (and IANAL), i'd keep any paperwork IBM has sent you disputing your claim of a faulty product. It may help you to settle the matter if it ever does go to court.
today is spelling optional day.
Many battery manufacturers design generic cells and current regulators and package them in carriers that are specified by the PC manufacturer. In this case the current regulators are to blame as they have difficulty dealing with minor variations in current required by the laptop's power supply. In particular, systems with less than robust power management, Linux for instance, literally suck the regulators to death.
I would suggest contacting the Better Business Bureau to get these complaints addressed.
Could it be that certain "lots" of batteries or laptops were bad? We have upgraded most of these to the T23 model, so I don't have one handy to check manufacture dates. Perhaps someone else who has had little or no problems can give you some dates.
-----
Am I the only one who thinks Tux is as creepy as the clown on Poltergeist?
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
I've also had this problem. I use an IBM Thinkpad 600 at work and the battery dies on me when I undock. It says it's just fine, but within minutes warns me that the battery is about to die, very similar to the report in the linked article.
It starts out fine with a new battery and gets progressively worse. I asked our helpdesk about it, and the helpdesk representative said that this sytem occasionally needs to be unplugged and the battery allows to run down, indicating this is a memory effect of some kind. His advice was once every 2 weeks, and he indicated that IBM suggested this to him. I'm a consultant but we have contracts both with external clients, and with clients who are sister companies. It is not uncommon therefore for me to not need to undock my laptop for months at a time.
I've gone through 2 batteries in a year. The batteries last about a month, after which I start dragging my power adapter around with me while the paperwork gets filled out for a new battery. This one died about 6 months ago, but my laptop is (and has been) scheduled for replacement since then so I haven't bothered to get it replaced.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
I've had a variety of IBM thinkpads...so its hard to keep track. I did have a 600e and if i used the battery, I always let it run completely out on the battery before plugging it back in...and I never had any problems with it. I've carried that practice on from the early days of laptop computing...where batteries had a memory of sorts that if oyu kept recharging them when they were halfway full you'd end up with the 50% of the battery being the active aprt, and the other 50% would be forgotten about, and un rechargable. I'm not sure if that is still the case in the newer thinkpads like the 600e though. Just an old habit. Anyone an expert on battery types?
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
I had a thinkpad 600e model 2645-EU
The interesting thing is that it a 3 year warranty on the whole, but the battery itself had only 1 year. When the battery failed on me the first year i had the laptop, I called IBM support and they said "yeah we had a problem with one run of the batteries and it's fixed now", I got an RMA'd one, it worked for 2 years, and now it's dead too. We even tried here at work to 'fool' IBM by trying to RMA a whole laptop -- they sent us a refurbished 600e... sans the battery, with the instructions "use your old batter"
Not an IBM, but apple's ibooks have the same problem. The dropoff point on the battery goes up and up and up (for fun I held onto my last one until you unplugged it, the battery discharged to 97% before going dead). I was wondering if it was a charging problem or if there is a common li-ion battery manufacturer who is at fault...maybe a common manufacterer makes the same battery charging components for IBM and Apple, though?
You can have a look here for some reports of the dead batteries (though most of the people there are blaming it on jaguar, I run linux on my ibook and have had the problem twice).
So stick it to apple while you're at it, eh? Of course if you're smart, buy the extended warranty. It will cost apple a lot more money to give you an extra battery every 3 months for 3 years than it will to fix/replace your ibook probably. Might as well teach them a lesson...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
I have deployed and supported both Thinkpad 600 and 600X configurations, and Dell Latitude 366 and 300 MHZ models, and they all seem to have batteries that last just over a year.
Literally, to the point that we will get a sudden surge.. six or so a week, of stone dead batteries. A little digging on my part led me to believe that the six came in together as well, and they usually died a little bit over a year after purchase. (Note, this is a "little bit" after the warranty.. batteries are warranted for one year from date of purchase of the LAPTOP not the battery, at least here.)
Now, the IBM's have a charging circuit that keeps the battery "conditioned". Would this kill a battery in a year? Probably. WHat I know a lot of people do is ONLY put the battery in if they are going to use it off AC. Charge it for an hour before you need it, and run it down. When you get back to your desk, pop the battery out, and dock without the battery.. that seems to be the "rage" as rumored by our customers who have traveled to Japan, where they claim people do this.
YMMV, but as a tech who supports about 1K of these things, yeah.. the batteries die in a year, and yeah, the IBM party line is "this is normal".
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
I have a vaio SR11k. The battery is slowly degrading (down to 120 minutes from initial 150 minutes a year ago), but the interesting thing is that at the beginning the charge reported by the BIOS (APM) was almost linear, now I get the last 60 (!) minutes of operation in the last 4% of detected battery charge.
My solution to this is ext3 (I mostly run Linux on it) and just running it until it goes down by itself. If the IBMs have similar behaviour, but force a power-off at, say, 10% detected charge, an equivalent battery would be good for only about 30 minutes instead of the 2 hours I get.
Side note: I am not using the laptop that often, maybe 2 times per week on battery.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
Same here... I rarely (a few minutes per month)
use my battery and I've gone through two.
(My 560 did not not have this problem, sure the
battery life diminished but the 600 has burned
through two batteries)
Friends are having the same problem.
i've been sticking with thinkpads.
the cdrom failed long ago.
I'd like to get a new thinkpad but since IBM
can't even get it together to get USB 2.0
(or firewire) I'm looking elsewhere.
Maybe I'll go back to Mac... is't been 19 years
since I bought a Mac.
We had a bunch of 600 and 600e's at work, and one by one the batteries died. We had a 3 year warrantee deal, and it was ok for about 2-2.5 years. Then, they stop honoring dead batteries! I don't know if our tech help didn't protest or tell the right people in our company, but I was told "IBM won't honor the warrantee, your group or you personally will have to buy a new battery". Just out and out said, too bad. WTF! Since I was the last one to have such an old laptop, no one really cared to raise a stink about it.
We generally get good service from IBM, but the techs said that IBM was blowing off these batteries because they all started dying after 1.5-2.5 years, and they figured they ALL were going to go bad.
This sounds like the car manufacturer beancounter stories- how much to fix all the problems vs. how much in potential lawsuits. And how many people are going to press a lawsuit for a $100-$200 battery?
The worst part is the battery is dead, the hard drive is physically failing, it's slow as molasses, but since it still works I can't get an upgrade! How many seconds in a microwave....?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I entered RPI a year later and got a T20 notebook and have had the same problems. While I haven't had to replace the battery, it only works long enough to boot Windows and go into sleep mode. Most of my friends also have this problem, and we all took care in properly charging the batteries. Seems like it's an Thinkpad problem, not just a 600 problem.
I've had 2 TP 600's (a PII-266 TP 600, and a PII-366 600e), both used. The 600 came with a battery that it seemed wouldn't die, and the 600e came with a dead battery.
:
It seems this is not an unusual situation, if you spend a little time looking around on eBay. Here's how to avoid trouble
1. Do a search for 'dead Thinkpad 600 battery', and note the FRU#'s.
2. Do not buy a replacement battery that matches one of those numbers. It's just a matter of time. If it's not dead already, it will be.
I don't know the FRU# on it (process of elimination following step 1 above will tell you which ones are ok), but it's my recollection that they fixed this problem. You just have to find the right battery.
Need a simple, easy to use data tier generator? http://www.gryphinsoftware.com/
Ack! NO!!!! Not for lithium cells!
If you actually managed to fully drain a lithium battery, you would run the risk of polarity reversal. That is BAD! Part of the reason lithium battery packs have a microchip is to shut them off before they fully discharge. The chip also regulates the charge cycle so they don't grenade from overcharging.
NiCD batteries develop a charge memory and must be conditioned. NiMH batteries do to but to a much lesser extent. Lead acid batteries are the exact opposite, keep 'em charged up at all times.
Just remember, who's lap it's on top of.
Yet another example of the old 'Tute Screw! (all -1,Offtopic mods indicate that you didn't go to RPI)
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This happened to my 600-Something too.
More information can be found here, it even explains how to get some more life out of your battery.
OK, I just checked some stats on my batteries for fun...
Between the two of them I have a design capacity of 38.88 + 34.56 Wh. In reality I have a functional full-charge capacity of 20.06 + 23.06 Wh respectively. I unplugged the power and I'm down to 19.54Wh + 22.06Wh in one minute.
The discharge cycle counts are 144/329 respectively.
Generally, it's about 2 hours of real use I get out of them, The calculated time is 4:14, but it's going to turn out a lot less than that.
I don't know if this means I have a normal set of batteries or not, but I'm not as impressed with them as I used to be. I had hoped that Li-Ion was better than the Ni-Cd of yester year.
At this rate, I can hardly code my way across the country. Originally I was able to run >7 hours of use.
Disclaimer: I am a longtime Mac user as well.
Ok. So the guy has a problem with ONE brand of PC laptops. With PC's you have a choice of over a dozen vendors and the best recommendation you can come up with is to buy a Mac? A computer that uses a completely different operating system and would require not only re-training but a reinvestment in new software for this new OS? Why didn't you recommend a HP, Dell, Gateway,Sony, Micron or even a whitebox laptop?
THINK people THINK. There's nothing wrong with Macs. I love them. But they aren't for everyone.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
My wife's ibook is an original blue one. She still gets 3+ hours out of the battery. Enough for her to work on a plane from west to east coast without a charge.
Try this. if you have one of these laptops that seems to have a short battery life (You'll notice, battery meters will say you have 100%, 95%, 90%, 85%, 80%, 75%, then suddenly 5%.) run until the battery is "dead". Then use tape to cover the two MIDDLE battery terminals these are the terminals that report the charge level back to the laptop. (there are 4 altogether). Put the battery back in and the laptop will start right up, I get another 30-40 minutes. Any battery monitors will report that you don't have a battery installed so you won't know how much time you have left, AND DO NOT CHARGE YOUR LAPTOP WITH THESE TERMINALS COVERED. The laptop will not detect when the battery is full and you can overcharge the battery permanently damaging it (not that it isn't screwed up already)
Insert pithy comment here.
Both of these have a battery life under RH 7.2 of about 1.5 hours, which is about the same as they ever had. Both have been used constantly for years. The Fujitsu, in fact, has a flaky power plug, so it is frequently switching between AC and Battery power, yet it has no battery life issues.
My point being, it is not all IBMs, all laptops, or even normal. If you're having an issue, report it to the company. If the company won't help, report it to the BBB.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
I have a Sony laptop that uses the BP-7 battery, and its smart circuitry seems to have developed a bit of a problem as well. The battery charges, and according to PowerPanel has a 98% capacity charge. Within five minutes of use it has dropped to 10% and triggers an emergency suspend.
Is two years use unreasonable for a battery that retails at over $200?
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
It's Raph, not Ralph. :)
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
My company has 35 Thinkpad 600s. These laptops have been great, and they have not had any unusual battery problems.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
I've had a 380XD for a few years now (bought it brand new), and every 6 to 12 months I have had to get a new battery, either IBM or OEM replacements. The laptop only gets used maybe once or twice a week, as it is a network testing machine, and I make sure to let the battery run down to about 10% before I charge it back up. There is definately somthing wrong with IBMs battery management system in their laptops. Additionally, a friend of mine has a newer ThinkPad (not sure which series, but it was purchased in fall of 2000) that suffers the same battery issues.
-===- "Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserver neither" -===-
Have a look at Panasonic's LiION webpage. This is consistent with the other battery blurbs I have seen. LiION batteries have a cycle count of ">500", which means that someone who charges their laptop every day will have a dead battery fairly soon. This is the cost of not having to lug around NiMH batteries, which weigh about the double for the same capacity. NiMH would have lasted about twice as long, but then nobody would have bought the laptop because it was too heavy.
Dell's Inspiron batteries are only rated for 400 cycles (ctrl-f for "battery life") of charge/discharge.
That's not long at all, especially if you consider the transit commuter, using his laptop on the ride to and from the office - that's only 200 working days.
I just wish I knew where the "1.5/3 hours" figure comes from though. Even brand new, I was lucky to get 45 minutes, and that's minimal hard drive activity... although I suppose Linux could just be sucking more power (more threads in the background or something) than Windows does.
I have about 10 of those 600's floating around (3-4 years old). Statistically the battery lives are normal. There was one that had the battery dead in about one year. On the other end, several days ago I was working on another one that was up for about 2.5 hours on battery before complaining. The battery was changed only on 2 of them, but some of the original batteries are in pretty poor shape.
It doesn't seem to be any behaviour pattern consistent with the model number (600, 600X) or with the operating system (most of them are Linux only, several are dual boot).
However I agree that IBM should be more selective with the quality of the battery they install in their laptops. Even if the overall quality of their laptops is by far the best, crappy batteries and lack of built-in modems (no, that cannot be called modem) may be a serious concern.
I have had my 600e for 3yrs now an am on my 4th battery. I find they last the longest when you don't leave the tp pluged in for extended periods of time. If I'm not traveling alot and my tp just sits on my desk pluged in after about 4-6 months the batt is shot. If I actually unplug it and take my tp home at night from a client that bat lasts about a year before I start running into issues. Anyway I always have 2 on hand, one being a good one and the other somewhere in between. Anyway I just ordered my 5th one today as well as a new cdrom drive as it seems to have just given out.
Batteries may seem to be getting weaker, but the fact is that battery tech can't nearly compete with the break-neck pace of the electronics they power. Laptops today are so incredibly power hungry due to the ever increasing number of systems that each one has to support (now P4s and Athlons with seperate actual video cards; huge hard drives, huge screens, and our biggest power guzzling friend the WiFi card) that batteries loose it quite quickly. I've got a compaq armada 7700 from either 98 or 99 at 266 mhz. This thing will run for two or three hours on battery (I bought it off of auction, too; go figure) and stay on stand-by for literally days. Then again, it's got a 12 inch screen, is almost three inches thick and weighs about 29 pounds. But hey, I'm willing to sacrifice size, looks, and everything else for longevity. But if you want the latest, then power hungry ye be; better bring your adapter.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
Yeah; I've got three friends who've got the same Latitude CPx or CPi (or something very similar) series laptops -- two completely fell apart at the hinges, the other is on its way to falling apart as well.
that said; I also know people who have relatively new top-of-the-line Dell laptops and they seem extremely solid...
We bought over 120 IBM ThinkPad 600 and 600Es in 1998-2000. The ThinkPads are awesome machines except for the battery life. IBM has admitted to us (at least as much as IBM ever admits to anything) that there are some issues with the batteries and possibly even the charge controllers. They have been fairly good about swapping out batteries even those out of warrenty.
If you or RPI is spending a few million dollars a year with IBM and aren't getting your batteries replaced, someone needs to lean on IBM.
Of course, if you're not spending big bucks with IBM, suck it up. The battery is nearly four years old. How long did you expect it to last? Replacing the battery once a year doesn't sound that bad, does it?
(After-market batteries are available for the 600-series. Rebuilds are also out there. You may want to check those out. They don't last any longer than the IBM batteries (since it seems to be the charge controller) but cost about half to 75% as much.)
InitZero
Yes, I've got a 600e and it's eaten two batteries (and the third is starting on the downward curve.) It's a couple of years old, so I guess it's not that bad.
;-))
However, a couple things to consider. There are at least three ways to get replacements from IBM. One is full retail - it's very expensive and not a good idea. Another is to call about the warranty, even if it's out of warranty. They offered to give me a battery for half price if I shipped them the old one. Lastly, if it's under warranty they'll send you a new one and a prepaid box to send the old one back.
Another thing to consider when discussing rechargeable batteries is that you need to look and see what technology the battery in question is. Lots of people are spouting off stuff about full discharge, topping off, etc, but that's all a load if they don't know what kind of batteries you've got. NiMh != Nicads != Lithium Ion. Proper care of each is fairly different - Li Ion being the strangest. Do some googling and you can find articles about proper care for each type of battery.
My 600E has/had Li Ion batteries and I was surprised to read one day that it damages them to discharge them below 40% capacity. Couple that with a fixed number of recharge cycles (where going from 95% to 100% counts as a cycle) and you see that any time you run on batteries, you should go down to 40% and then recharge.
Also note that the latest BIOS for the 600E won't start a recharge cycle unless the battery is below 95%, which is a good thing. IBM also recommends that you upgrade the configuration utility when you call about the battery warranty - they claim somehow the newer version is better for the batteries as well.
Given that I run Linux I have my doubts that it matters to me, but I did update it in case it tweaked some setting in the hardware.
All in all I've been looking at a battery every 18 months as part of the cost of ownership. If that bothered me a whole lot, I'd take the batteries out unless I really needed them and store them however is appropriate for the technology.
(Enough rambling for now
For the 2000 600/600e's that my office is responsible for. That is over three years. We have seven other techs who have changed out about the same number. So in three years, we have had to change out over 1400 batteries.
For all of my laptops, I made it a habit to discharge the battery to about 10% every two to three weeks and recharge it when the unit is off. If I'm not going to be using the battery I take it out and leave it in the laptop bag.
Pretty simple but tedious. At the same time, however, I have not had to purchase a replacement battery for any laptop I've ever owned.
As a side note, I gave my Thinkpad 600 to my mother about a year ago and she has never had a problem either. She still discharges the battery to 10% once a month and it is still in good condition.
Or used to until a couple of weeks ago, anyway this is all still valid...
If your laptop is under warranty just send it in. The repair facility is not owned by IBM, and the policies are pretty lax. If you send in your laptop complaining of battery problems, 9 times out of 10 the tech will replace the battery without even testing it. If they should happen to test it and think you are wrong they are required to contact you before sending it back unrepaired. When they call, just bitch enough and you'll get your battery (but bitch in a polite tone of voice).
The turn around time for the each unit is 24 or 48 hours, meaning your laptop can't be at the depot for any longer than the designated time (most are 48, but they try to do it in 24 anyway). This means that if you send in your laptop on Monday, you'll probably have it back by Thursday (and possibly Wednesday), and with a brand new battery. Note, this only works for units under warranty. If you purchased the extended warranty it will be honored. If your warranty has expired in the last 30 days that's ok too, you're still covered.
Apple does 3 things right on the power front.
1. CPU's draw less power. While Apple uses the same CPUs in it's laptops as it's desktops (And the same core logic), it's CPU's are very energy efficient. This does allow them to have a nearly unnoticable performance gap, unlike the desktop world (A 1.8GHz Mobile P4 is not faster than a 1GHz standard G4).
2. Big Honking batteries. Apple uses 47, 55 and 61 watt-hour batteries, most PC laptops top out at 38-40 watt-hours. Between this and the much lower draw CPU's is why 'Books see 4-6 hour battery life and PC's see 2.5 hours on a good day.
3. High Quality Batteries. Apple buys Sony batteries. This is one reason that you seem to get less laptop for more cash. It's also a reason why apple batteries last 3-5 years and PC batteries don't. Cheap ass batteries (Like those in low-end Thinkpads) don't last.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
Laptop batteries are disposable components with a very limited lifetime. You will have to replace them after a year or two. Every manufacturer and every experienced user knows this. The same is true for AC adapters. These, too, are designed to break.
Laptops are only just taking to grab the market, after desktop PCs have become commonplace and profit margins declined, the best profits are now in mobile computing.
But I still wonder why we, the users, accept overpriced short-life batteries, after all these years.
A few weeks ago, I wrote up a text for an online petition with a long list of reasons why we need an industry standard for laptop batteries, similar to consumber electronics battery cells.
Noone really showed interest, though, so I didn't expect enough people to join the cause and haven't started the actual petition.
So again, I welcome your comments.
(And I'm looking for someone willing to host the petition, too, since my puny web server isn't quite ready for that...)
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
I had no idea laptop batteries died this frequently. I've got a Dell Latitude with two LiIon batteries, and they've been going good for a little over 3 years now. I use this laptop quite frequently, for taking notes in class, and it spends a fair amount of time off of wall current. I guess I only use it about 15 hours a week, is that low? Are we talking only 1 year for people who use their laptops 40+ hours a week?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I had two Li batterys for my cheap CTX laptop. They started off lasting an hour, After six months they last twenty minutes and not long after were dead. Since I allways haul it around in its padded suitcase I got three
:-O
6Volts 10AH lead acid batterys for about E30 total which fit in a section of the bag. Added about 1Kg to the weight. The mains PSU puts out 20V DC so the 18V from the batterys runs it nicly for about 10 hours. I made a little adaptor with a diode and a resistor so I can trickle charge the batterys with the laptop psu, though after a trip I usually put the batterys on proper charger.
My laptop has a built in switching regulator and runs happily from 10.5V to 20V but some, like those Sony Vios I can't afford need, a regulated input.
I hook the three batterys together with some short wire with spade connectors. I didn't want to put an inline fuse in each wire so if I ever get the connections seriously wrong there will be some fireworks that won't be appriciated on a packed train.
My years of ham radio, building electronic projects and seeing idiots
weld spanners to industrial UPS battery stacks have taught me to be
carefull with high-current batterys.
Ah ha! And even more useful than my above post, is in fact the link to said program. Here ya go... ftp://ftp.pc.ibm.com/pub/pccbbs/mobiles/isbr01ww.e xe
and the ever useless readme ...
ftp://ftp.pc.ibm.com/pub/pccbbs/mobiles/isbr01ww.t xt
enjoy.
STANDARDS: The principles we use to reject other people's code.
I went to dinner with a CEO at a johnson and johnson subsidiary company the other night, and we were taling about experiances with different laptops, ranging from dell to apple. I said that IBM makes quality laptops but for a premium (my personal experiance). He quickly said "oh god they don't, we purchased several hundred laptops from them and everyone has had a battery problem, and we're losing a rediculous ammount of money buying everyone new ones every few weeks".
I didn't ask about the model numbers, but when I saw this article I just thought throw that out there.
How about doing a Slashdot Pole on how long your laptop battery lasted? Let's get some real data.
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-5.htm
The basic gist of it is this:
Lithium-ion has low maintenance, low self-discharge rate, and battery packs have built in circuitry to protect the pack from complete discharge and damage. I point you to the quote "Some capacity deterioration is noticeable after one year, whether the battery is in use or not."
I have recently replaced the battery in my Dell laptop after it's 1.5th birthday. Pricy, but all the research I did indicated that that's the lifetime of the pack, wether used or not.
Seriously, the (simple) replacement of a $100 part once a year for the life of a $1000-3000 device is part of the TCO.
Actually, the BBB exists for the "Business" and not
the consumer. I swear their role is specifically to
"make the annoying consumer shut the fuck up and
take some sort of pitiance and go away" instead of
actual problem resolving. They tend to pretend they
are some sort of government sanctioned agency,
which they ARE NOT, instead of the private company
they are. Your absolute best course of action is:
#1 check all company's out at www.resellerrating.com
before making a purchase. And a note: just because
they have a high rating doesn't mean you shouldn't
read the comments posted by prior customers, and
you shouldn't pay special attention to how good
they are at refunds/replacements. A lot of these
fly-by-night companys have high ratings, but
extremely low ratings for warrantee service. As
long as what you get from them works, great. But
you can be SOL if you get sent something broken.
#2 If you do get screwed, use google to find out
what state the company does business in, and
contact that states ATTORNEY GENERAL'S OFFICE for
consumer affairs. Almost all states have an online
complaint filing system. The good thing about
going through the AG is that your complaint will
stay on file forever. The next person that files
a complaint will add to the pile, and they'll
notice. I've had 4 experiences recently with the
AG's consumer affairs offices in NJ, NY, CA, and
TX, and they ALL got me my refund/replacements
within a month. They all have an online fraud
complaint filing system. Hope this helps.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.