Cæptain's Log

Posts Tagged ‘Ebay’

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)

I just realized that the SMA connectors used in wireless systems in computers are reverse polarity connectors when my SMA right angle connector came in.

It had the wire pointing out of the nut end where the SMA connectors I’ve seen all have the wire pointing out of the bolt end – meaning the connector I bought was completely incompatible with my antenna / U.FL adapter.

I spent $5.20 to order an RP-SMA right angle Male – Female from China, as nobody in this country seems to advertise any for sale….    Expect more delays to my antenna project.

I went to my parents house this weekend to pick some stuff up to sell on ebay and to get my escort back and although it wasn’t a bad time, I suppose there was some bad karma this weekend waiting for me.
First I decided to install an Alpha version of an invite-only os – Jolicloud (which is basically Ubuntu Netbook Remix reskined and with a really flashy, networked application installer).  However, during the install, I set it to (supposedly) have grub make the default boot my Windows XP partition.  Unfortunately, it erased the MBR and screwed a bunch of shit up – and since I was at my parents house for the weekend I didn’t have anything to repair the MBR with – and if I did, I would have to load a windows disc onto a USB drive since I’m using a netbook and I don’t have a disc drive for it.
So I just did a system restore and wiped my almost-full 130gb partition to hell.

I’ve done this a million times and it’s always gut wrenching and stressful as you’re doing it / shortly after – but you get over it and realize that most of the data isn’t that important – even though this time I wasn’t able to back up all my emails and lost a bunch of contacts / important information that I’ll have to look into recovering sometime when I need it.

So right now I’m in the process of reinstalling everything and getting everything the way I want it.

I considered moving to windows 7, but I didn’t have the usb installer on me at the time and I don’t feel like reinstalling everything AGAIN….. even if my data (what little I’ve accumulated in the past 24 hours) would be backed up…

So anyways, after that I figured that I’d atleast get to drive my own car back home (if you don’t know the story and want to know then ask me – it’s short and uninteresting but I don’t wanna write about it) – but when I took it down to fill it with gas I realized that the speedometer doesn’t work (the rest of the tac does though, so it isn’t a fuse or anything).  That along with the one headlight that is burnt out (unless the brights are on) and the sunroof being broken into (from some asshole who got into my car and unscrewed my shiftknob and used that to bust my sunroof out from the inside) and the main problem with the rear wheel being cocked at an angle and burning through tires every 6 months really sucks…  but whatever…

On an unrelated topic – I just bought a 9-cell battery for the netbook and a right-angle SMA adapter so the antenna doesn’t stick out of the netbook so far that it would risk breaking off – with my new layout it should rest comfortably across the battery when not in use, and stick up parallel with the monitor when erect; and I can’t find a drill, which I’ll need to make the modification……. which is gonna be the biggest delay, probably….  I’ll see if I can get a good dremel bit for this project, as I’ll be mounting the SMA plug in the Kensington lock spot.

I’ll update when more parts arrive – I’m still waiting on most of them (my router and the cable came quite quickly, but I still need the card and the right angle adapter to finish the hack, and I haven’t even gotten the 3 shirts I ordered last week or my replacement windows casebadge).