On Sat, 05 Feb 2011 17:35:58 -0600, Jim Yanik
wrote:


p.s. I was wondering just how the original Dell battery declared
itself 'dead' and therefore, if I was to re-cell the original with the
cells from the clone, will it be happy (or have the electronics now
shut down for good)?


maybe it's better to buy generic laptops instead of name brands,and then
you can use generic chargers and battery packs.

Assuming they all aren't going that way as has been suggested then yes
I guess it would.

FWIW the only laptop I have ever bought new was a Compaq Contura and I
think that may have been a 386. The rest were mostly given to me
(broken) or sold cheap (low spec or with known faults) etc.

Daughters Dell Latitude came the cheap way (mate buys laptops by the
pallet) with an unknown BIOS password but £20 and t'internet had that
sorted. ;-)

Daughters b/f bought the Dell Inspiron 1545 new as did the owner of
the Studio 1535 I'm looking at now and in light of the current issues
I'm not sure if either would go that way again. However, how could you
tell if a laptop used 'tied' components like this?

Also, I wonder what proportion of laptop buyers go looking for cheap
replacement bits off eBay versus buying them straight off the
manufacturers web site (and therefore never 'seeing the problems')?

IN the case of the Dells I have here atm I'm not sure any of the
issues have said 'This is not a Dell battery / adaptor' but:

"This battery has experienced a permanent failure and needs to be
replaced".

"Warning: The battery cannot be identified.
This system will be unable to charge this battery"

... and similar with the power adaptors.

So presumably those could still happen whoever's brand sticker was on
the machine itself?

But yes, bring on the 'generic / modular' laptop (so it works more
like desktop clones) where not just things like optical drives can be
swapped between brands (and CPUs, RAM, HDDs etc) but system boards,
chargers and batteries.

But then I have never seen why we need so many different cars, washing
machines, TVs .....

Cheers, T i m