Simon Lau

Dell XPS m1210 9 Cell Replacement Battery

While on my Europe trip, my laptop’s battery got its biggest workout since I’ve owned it. As a matter of fact, today marks the 1 year anniversary of my laptop.

Nearing the end of my trip, I booted into Ubuntu and it reported that my laptop’s battery only had 34-36% effective life. There was over 60% degradation in one year of very little battery use. I had noticed the battery performance degrade and on maximum charge I was getting just under 2 hours. When I first got the laptop, I was hovering around 3-3.5 hrs, still less than what a 9cell should provide.

I gave Dell a call two days ago to report my issue and after a lengthy discussion with technical support, they offered to ship me a replacement battery. Not bad giving I had 2 days of warranty left at that time.

The new battery arrived this morning and it just finished its first charge.

new battery

new battery

New Battery Label (left) & Comparison of the batteries (right)

The original battery:

batterymond

nbc

With a wear level of 63%, I was only managing 1 hour 50 minutes under idle conditions in windows.

The new battery:

new battery

nbc new

With the new battery the full capacity is almost the same as the design capacity, short by only 200 mWh, unlike my original battery where the difference was around 55000mWh! Under full charge, the battery is slated to last in the range of 4.5 hours. This is under idle conditions, CPU throttling, wifi enabled and BlueTooth disabled. Once I get some new results, I will update with another post.

Tags: battery, dell, Laptop, XPS m1210