On Mar 6, 1:25 pm, wrote:
On Mar 6, 8:46 am, PeterD wrote:



On Thu, 6 Mar 2008 08:07:14 -0000, "hungerdunger"

wrote:
I'm trying to "renovate" a friend's old Packard Bell Easy Note F5280HR.

The old battery (11.1volts) is dead, and as the machine is quite old she
decided it wasn't worth spending over £100 on a battery from the UK, when we
could get one for half that price from China (via Ebay).

The battery arrived yesterday, and while identical in all other respects, it
is 14.8 volts. I emailed the vendor who has assured me it will be OK. I've
also spoken to a couple of other people who have told me it will NOT be OK,
and then I spoke to one of the tech guys in our local PC World who said that
as long as the voltage of the battery was less than the voltage output of
the charger (which is 19v) it would be OK.

Can anyone give me a definitive answer: can I use this battery?

Can you use it? Yes.

Safe to use it? NO!

Will the computer fail if you use it? Yes.

Will the battery fail if you use it? Probably, and it certainly won't
charge properly.

Well, the range of the mobo switching supplies could be wide enough
that you could use either battery, and there could be ID pins (or
I2C bus) to tell the charge switcher what voltage to output, and
there are numerous battery suppliers who specify a 14.8V (8 cells
@ 1.85V per)* pack for this model, but Packard Bell lists the battery
as 11.1V (6 cells @ 1.85V per)**, and a few battery sites indicate
that the two batteries are not interchangeable. Perhaps there was
a switchover from 6-cell to 8-cell during the production run (or
they reused the model number).

OP: Have you asked Packard Bell about this?http://support.packardbell.com/uk/it...&pn=PB03400601
(US readers - PB appears to still exist in the UK)

And are you sure the original battery is dead? This model reportedly
had a charging problem that was fixed with a BIOS update:http://support.packardbell.com/uk/it...c_02144&ppn=PB...

TM

* Make that 2 parallel strings of 3 cells: 3 * 3.7V = 11.1V
* Make that 2 parallel strings of 4 cells: 4 * 3.7V = 14.8V