In o.uk,
Peter Crosland wrote:
After eight years the batteries are well beyond their design life.
Indeed the machine is as well. You might consider cutting your losses
and buy a new machine.

Regards from Peter Crosland

I don't know... I don't think the same way about older laptops as you do
about them. For example I have 10 laptops from 2006 alone.

3 Gateway MX6124
6 Gateway M465
1 Alienware M9700 with two Nvidia 7900 GPU connected in SLI mode

And I have no interest whatsoever in any newer machines, except my four
netbooks from 2008. And my fascination with 2006 models is that they are
at the crossroads between XP, Vista, and Windows 7. And anything newer
it is hard to find XP drivers if they exist at all. And newer machines
don't have Cardbus slots anymore.

The Gateway M465 laptops are very versatile as well. They support
docking stations, 2 hard drives, 2 batteries, floppy drive and a wide
range of CPUs work in these things. Thus they can run either 32 bit or
64 bit OS. And because of the docking station, you don't have to worry
whether the DC jack works or not. And they came out with either matte or
glossy, wide or non-wide screens.

I see 2006 as a great year for computers including laptops. And IMHO
newer machines just are not as versatile. Heck does any newer laptops
even support docking stations anymore? Or are they gone too?

So how long can I use these 2006 laptops? I am not sure. Frankly I am
surprised they can still keep up with the latest software. Back in 2006,
I thought 2011 was when I had to give them up and to move on. But 2011
is here and I might still be using them in 2016. ;-)

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - OE-QuoteFix v1.19.2
Centrino Core Duo 1.83G - 2GB - Windows XP SP3