Cæptain's Log

The 9-cell battery I ordered came in recently and I figured I’d do a write-up on it, since there wasn’t much out there when I was researching these and kinda bit the bullet on it.

I bought the battery from an Ebay seller called Everwaypower in Shenzen, china for $55.88.  Shipping was free but took about 10 days to arrive.

The package was completely coated with packing tape and once I deciphered the box style I managed to cut the seams open.  Inside was the battery, extremely well packaged in cut foam and anti-static bag.

The battery was easy to install, as all the Aspire One batteries are considered universal (for the most part).  Unfortunately this 9-cell doesn’t meet flush with the seam of the bezel like the stock 6-cell does.  I also noticed that I could force the battery out of the lock, so don’t trust your battery to stay in if you hang onto the battery like a handle and swing it around (no sane person would do this but I’ve abused the hell out of my netbook and can attest to the stability of things).  This may be due to this series of battery being ‘optimized’ for the AoA (8.9″) series of Aspire1’s so if you shop around then you can potentially expect a better experience.

I’ve also included shots of the size difference.  Some of the older 9-cells I’ve seen had the cells stacked in a linear fashion, but this battery had them in an L formation, so it’s more compact (than older 9-cells).

Despite noted flaws this battery does hold up to the kind of quality I would expect for anything I’d affix to my netbook.

The battery is advertised as a brand new 7200mAh capacity battery.  As anyone should know, this manufactured capacity is not the true capacity, so I did some analysis with a program called Battery Care to learn more about my batteries.

This program reads capacity in mWh (miliWatts per hour) as compared to the standard miliAmperes per hour, so I’ll just use mWh for the rest of this writeup for sake of ease.

The ‘designed’ capacity of this particular 9-cell was 73260mWh; it’s actual capacity is 71817mWh, which equates to a very low wear level (the designed capacity is like a theoretical maximum, where the actual capacity goes down as the battery is worn) which is expected as it’s a new battery.

Battery Care isn’t very good at reporting accurate ‘time remaining’ calculations very frequently, but based on my tests the 9-cell lasts about 7 hours.  This should shock you as this is barely over what’s advertised as the battery life of the 6-cell, but keep in mind I’m now running Windows 7, with a lot of intensive processes (firefox / thunderbird / utorrent / gmabooster / dashboard widgets / full screen brightness / max wifi) so you have to consider this.  If you ran your netbook with the intentions of saving battery life then you should see some serious time clocks.  Contrast this with my previous 6-cell that now only gives me about 4 hours of life (50461mWh), and things make sense.

The lesson here is that my disregard for battery life and the use of windows 7 is costs me a great deal of battery life, however by using a 9-cell I can compensate for every watt of power consumed…

So to wrap things up:

Overall, this is a helluva deal if you can score it for as cheap as I did.  It takes a bit longer to ship from China but the quality is still good and assuming you don’t get a dud (as is known to happen with aftermarket batteries) then you will notice a difference.  There are the obvious flaws with using aftermarket products, like how the battery doesn’t fit flush with the bezel, but it does fit and lock in place (although it can be forced out).  Hopefully this helps those out there considering buying a 9-cell battery to more effectively weigh the pros and cons of owning one, at least for this model and style of battery.  I know there are other styles out there so I can’t assure you that you will have the same experience, but I encourage you to take the jump as you do get a performance gain.

• Pros
  • About 150% more charge time
  • More real estate on the back for pirate stickers
  • Priced about the same as any of this model’s 3 or 6 cell
• Cons
  • Can’t buy stock, so you gotta spend extra money to get one
  • Big and heavy
  • Might not fit flush with bezel
  • Takes a little longer to charge (obviously)

• Aspire One D150 Hack – Project: Net-War-Book (First Post!!)
• Tutorial: How to add an external antenna to an Acer Aspire One D150 (for 802.11N / XSpan support)
• SMA and RP-SMA
• Slight delay in plans…
• Belkin N1 #F5D8231-4 Pseudo-Review
• NetWarBook – Materials Bought