A Guide to Choosing Laptop Batteries

As a result of their portability, laptops are eating up PC market share. However, if you wish to take advantage of the laptop's portability, you will need to make sure your laptop battery is durable enough. If not, you will need to get a replacement laptop battery. What is the best laptop battery to buy?

If you are planning to buy a laptop battery, you need to pay attention to the reputation of the battery first. There are many laptop manufacturers on the market today. The best option, if your budget isn't so tight, would be a battery made by your laptop's manufacturer. However, those batteries would be far more expensive than the average price on the market. It has been reported that Dell charges four times as much as other suppliers. If you don't want to pay the high premium price, you can get one from another manufacturer.

It turns out that many famous laptop battery manufacturers don't actually manufacture, but rather brand their batteries. If you open up a genuine Sony laptop battery, you might find that the power cells are actually made by Toshiba, Panasonic, or another big name manufacturer. Power cells from third party brands are the same as those from original manufacturers, and they are much cheaper than those from original manufacturers.

There are four types of laptop batteries: nickel cadmium (NiCad) batteries, nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, lithium ion (Li-Ion) batteries, and lithium polymer batteries. There are very few NiCad batteries left on the market now because they are old and primitive. However, Ni-MH batteries are much more advanced than their Li-Ion and Li-Poly counterparts. Li-Ion and Li-Poly batteries are the most popular and advanced types of batteries available today. Most laptops are designed with one type of battery and cannot use other types. For example, if your original HP laptop computer battery is Li-ion, then you should get a Li-ion replacement battery.

Besides the battery's size, another important thing you should pay attention to is its power rating. Usually batteries are rated by Volts and Amperes, but most companies show battery ratings by Volts and Milliamperes (or mAh). One thousand milliamperes equal one amp. Some batteries, however, have both different Volts and Milliamperes, so it's hard to tell which has the strongest power. In fact, there is another way to rate power: through Watt-hours. Watt-hours is just a combination of Volts and Amperes. Therefore, you can easily figure out which battery is more powerful.