Where to buy a Laptop battery?

I've decided that before I waste money on stuff I might not need I'll just take it to the repair shop. I've already bought a battery and I might not even need it lol.

Thanks for all your help though. It has equipped me with knowledge just in case the repair shop try and pull a fast one on me.

 

To bad you weren't closer I've got few spare notebook drives I could give ya to test for free From the way it sounds though I'd be suprised if it wasn't a hd, but then again I can't personally see it so it's always possible. Best of luck to you, hope it doesn't cost to much, and once fixed you'll have a spare battery that will come in handy while on the road.

 

Yep, I was thinking the same although it's not like I've got bundles of cash to spend on spare stuff lol

Thanks for all your help. Really appreciate it

 

Keep us up to date if you wouldn't mind, would love to hear if we were even close and of course to make certain you got your notebook working again.

 

New battery arrived this morning and so far so good. When I turned it on it made the dodgy noise for a split second and then went back to normal.

It told me on the battery instructions to use it till it was dead and then to charge it up to full before using it again. Never heard of conditioning a battery before.

 

That's actually common for most most modern rechargeable batteries, wish the manufacturer 'conditioned' the battery for us ;(

It is always possible of the battery was toast it could have been sending bad voltage/power to the notebook causing power fluctuations, don't believe I've ever heard of that but would be an interesting report

 

Might have been something to do with when I poured hot chocolate over the laptop in June.

I'll be very happy if when I load it up again there's still no problems.

Should I send the dud battery back to them demanding my money back? lol jk

 

I've been conditioning the battery all afternoon and not too long ago it started making the noise again. I tried to close everything down but eventually a blue screen came up telling me that it was closing the computer down to protect it and before I could read any more on the blue screen it had turned itself off.

Does this sound like a faulty fan or something?

If it didn't start breaking till it had been on for a while could it be a cooler problem?

The repair shop I emailed hasn't replied yet

 

I still would think #1 hard drive. You said it was an intel chip, which I believe even the mobiles have heat protection in which they simply slow down, the notebook itself could be overheating. Can you tell if the system fan or fans are still moving ok?

I would almost be willing to put money on it being a hd though. You could check the bios to see if it has any heat settings, heat displays, etc or even see if there is a program to check system temps for the notebook, not sure if they exist for notebooks though.

Another possibility is checking your bios to see if your hd is 'smart' enabled which can sometimes help determine if a hard drive is failing.

Check a site such as http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/34579/147080.html

And a small free utility http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

 

As much as I appreciate this info hrblcantra I would be the last person to trust when footering around inside the computer. I'll just have to take it to the computer repairs shop and see what they can do with it.

I put my ear to the laptop and the noise was coming from near the fan. I totally believe your autopsy though

I stupidly didn't make any copies of my files while it was on because I thought it was working lol.

 

lol I understand, though hd's in notebooks are extremely easy to replace. They just slide in and out for the most part Usually you need to remove the cover, they pull out, you may need to put the new drive into the thin metal frame which is nothing more than a couple of screws, than slide it back in. 5 minutes tops being extremely careful for the swap out, than it's a matter of getting your OS reinstalled.

Checking smart, bios, etc also does not having anything to do with opening the system up.

The files
http://www.passmark.com/ftp/diskcheckup.zip
'very simple program' will tell you if the hd is smart enabled and can show you if it's failing
http://www.ariolic.com/download/activesmart.exe
a bit more powerful, but then again if the puter is not booting at all now you can't run them, plus you 'could' cause more damage to the drive if that's the case.

sorry wish I could help more

 

Thanks mate, you've been extremely helpfull. I'm a sad man when I dont have my laptop running

I'll be taking it to get repaired on Monday if I dont work out your guide!

 

My new hard drive arrived today and I managed to install it myself lol

Just wondering what is the recommended partition size on a 40GB hard drive?

 

Glad to hear, not realy a recommended amount. You can either do it in one large partition, or I find it useful to give say 5 gigs or so for a backup partition. This way incase your os seriously fails you can easily reinstall and reformat on the main partition while having your most important files saved to the the back up partition,

 

So I should make a 35GB and a 5GB partition?

 

Well you wont get a full 35 gig and 5 gig as hd's are actually smaller than what they are rated at. Whatever the amount you might feel you would need for your most important files I would recommend, maybe even a gig would suffice? The amount realy depends on the user, how much do you need on your main drive and how much do you need on the second partition for back up. Roughly 3-5 gigs I would think would be good for a 40 gig drive though.

 

And would I put the OS on the 3-5GB space or are you saying it should go on the 33-35GB space? lol I've never been able to get my head round this stuff.

 

The os in the main area is what I would recommend, the main partition 'or largest'. This way if you need to reformat the drive from a serious OS crash you can reformat that partition safely without worrying about your secondary partition being reformatted.

I don't run all of my systems like this, but the ones I do I'm glad I do in times of needing to reinstall the OS

 

Thanks for your help again. I might be back with more queries if it asks me any more hard questions lol.

 

Not a problem