A very short mini-review of a netbook battery

Another review in the “look what arrived” series.
It all started when an acquaintance brought me his netbook for repair. The first diagnosis was that the battery was dead.
Anyway, I ordered a replacement, received it, and wrote a short report in case it might be useful.

I’ll say right away that I didn’t choose the seller at random. About a month earlier, someone had posted a pretty good review of a battery bought from this same seller on another site, so I bookmarked the store. That came in handy.

As I mentioned above, the netbook they brought me showed the battery at 0% when switched on, and said it was charging. It stayed that way forever. The netbook is about 4 years old, model N310—a bit of an old-timer.


I went to the store I’d bookmarked earlier and picked a suitable battery. Then I quickly checked prices elsewhere; nothing seemed cheaper, so I placed the order.

I placed the order on October 6 and received it on November 2. It was shipped with tracking via Sweden Post.
When I picked it up at the post office, they handed me this little box.


The battery was inside, nestled in foam. Overall, no complaints about the packaging: everything was intact and neatly packed.


It looks pretty neat on the outside, and at least it looks like the original :)


Next, I wanted to compare them first. No, I understand this isn’t an original; I was just curious.
The first thing that caught my eye was that the printing on the battery was upside down.
To read both labels, you have to place the batteries with their connectors facing each other.
So there’s the first difference, at least.


The second difference is the part numbers, even though the characters look identical.
There’s one more difference, though: the new one says “Standard,” while the old one says “Long Life.”


The third difference is the feet.
The original has rubber feet; the copy has plastic ones. It seems like a minor detail, but it later caused trouble.


The fourth difference is the height.
The new battery is noticeably taller.


The feet themselves are slightly taller on the old battery, but overall the new one is still taller.


Fifth difference.
The old battery sits flush in its slot, so the surface around the latch is level with the bottom of the netbook.


The new battery sticks out by about 1 mm. It's not exactly a deal-breaker, but it fits very tightly—and, by the way, it's much harder to remove, too.


When I turned it on, it showed a 73% charge.


After that, I waited for it to charge (about an hour) and ran a short battery-life test.
I set the screen brightness to maximum, disabled the power-saving features, and played a movie as the workload. Since the netbook is rather underpowered, though, CPU usage was around 50–70%.
The netbook ran for about 4.5 hours. In my opinion, that's a pretty good result for this kind of workload.
A second test didn't change the picture much: about 4 hours and 45 minutes.


Now for the nasty surprise with the feet.
The thing is, on this netbook model the battery protrudes slightly beyond the case, which is why it has feet in the first place.
But the new battery is taller and tips the netbook forward a little, so the front feet barely grip the desk.
Put more simply, it now slides across the desk while you're typing, and in some situations it rocks back and forth like a seesaw.


Summary.
Pros
Decent capacity
Low price
Good packaging and delivery.

Cons
The case is clearly not original, which causes problems with the feet.

In my opinion, this is a perfectly usable battery, but be prepared to look for some self-adhesive feet—at least for this particular battery model.
My two cents: it's worth ordering.

At least now I have an old battery from a netbook/laptop, too. I'll have to pry the cells out of it.
By the way, I tried opening the new one, but couldn't do it without damaging it. I didn't want to break it since I hadn't bought it for myself.
On the plus side, I took the netbook apart several times while fixing the keyboard. What a ridiculous design this model has.

I hope this short review is useful, even if it's probably not all that interesting :)