Know Your Laptop Battery

When given this question to any laptop or notebook computer user, they will get puzzled. This happens to me once when someone ask me about my laptop battery. As you can see, before you replace your laptop battery it is quite important to know a bit on the back ground first. There are several types of laptop batteries which I will share in this post.

Types of Laptop Batteries:

1. Alkaline - This is one of the common batteries around but only few laptops used it and the flaw about alkaline batteries is that is not rechargeable. You have to throw it once it goes flat.

2. Lead Acid - One of the most commons usage for this type is for laptop computers. It is long lasting, durable and rechargeable but unfortunately it is heavy and full of lead :P .

3. Lithium-Ion - The type of battery you would want to have for your laptop. The fast charging effect make it good for users on the go (need not wait for a long time for the battery to get charged completely). It is also environment friendly as well.

4. Nickel-Cadium - Ni-Cd batteries is one of the oldest and best performance types of rechargeable batteries but it has a major problem. After a long usage ( a few years), the battery will suffer from the dreaded memory effect. This means that the lifespan usage of the battery will deteriorate as time goes by.

5. Nickel- Metal Hydride - Ni-MH batteries is considered to be the successor of the Ni-Cd batteries but unfortunately the dreaded memory effect is as bad as well. However as compared between Ni-Cd and NiMH batteries, the latter last longer as compared to its predecessor.

The odds that you will using the Lithium-Ion batteries are 99% ( that's if you are using the new breeds of laptops :) ). Just check the abbreviation that says LION or Li-Ion on your laptop battery label. There are still a few laptops that are using Ni-MH batteries these days and you might want to check with the manufacturer whether you can do an upgrade from Ni-MH to Li-Ion. Using unapproved batteries could led to dire consequences .... so do be very careful on this. If you have a higher budget you might want to check out SMART batteries. It has a power management circuitry and it will indicate to the user what is the current condition of the battery.

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