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Refurbished Batteries, Good or Bad?
TheMadReaper asks: "I recently had to replace my laptop battery and couldn't decide whether to go for a new battery or a refurbished one. The refurbished ones are sold at a lot of places, but then I ran across this article that claims that refurbished batteries suck. For sure a bunch of you out there have tried refurbished batteries. So tell me, are they a good buy or a scam?"
the lack of available specs. and guarantees.
You are handing them a black box that doesn't work, and getting back one that does. This leaves a great deal of room for them to use cheaply available surplus cells to refurb. the pack. The fact is, if your battery is more than a year old it's very likely cells of the same dimensions and voltage are available with even better amp-hour ratings than the original. But it's hard for companies to compete who sell a product with the improved batteries as the metrics buy which their competition, and the original manufacturer are rated are nebulous, fakeable and often unavailable. I've had good luck with the people at PrimeCell.
Having played with Li-Ion charge circuits (yes, just the reference design from Atmel) I can see that calibration might be an issue. I don't however think it will be a critical one. Very smart chargers can in fact compensate for the changing characteristics of aging batteries. That the people replacing them would insert cells with characteristics within the "acceptable margins." of the compensating code doesn't sound impossible either.
That "no carrier" joke really doesn't work if you include your sig.
Sorry, no cigar for you.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Wazzup with that, is it as simple as they just make so much profit on their custom designed batt packs that they don't care?
Bingo. I think that's the majority of the reason. There are other things to think about though. First of all, the type of battery is a concern. NiCads are very heavy for the amount of capacity they give. Second only to Lead Acid, I think. NiCad batteries put out a very low voltage compared to other types of cells. I don't think they are very good at handling massive output, high-drain devices such as a laptop. They are also not very environmentally friendly -- cadmium is an extremely toxic metal. Given the number of problems we already have dealing with computer waste, I think it's good to try and avoid NiCad batteries.
Moving on to Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries instead: They're certainly feasable to use as laptop batteries, I think the major problem is that the way that the standard AA/C/D cells are laid out, you get a much much lower amount of energy storage for a given amount of space when you combine the roundness of the cells, plus the packaging and terminals, etc. And space in laptops is at a premium -- battery life is already too short, no need making it shorter.
With that said, I'm all for settling on a few standards for laptop batteries. And while we're at it, some standards for expansion bay equipment would be really nice... okay, okay, I'll quit my dreaming now.
Random and weird software I've written.