Gone are the days when a laptop would come with an easily removable external battery that could be swapped out if it failed or that could be swapped half way through the day if you needed to for a fully charged one.

You should expect a laptop to run for at least 5 to 6 hours of office type use on a full charge and you would expect the battery in the laptop to last 4 or 5 years.

Advances in battery technology over the last 5 to 10 years has simultaneously reduced the need to replace them, but in turn has increased the complexity of replacing them.

Sometimes batteries can develop a fault that means that it needs to be replaced, now this is fine if your device is under warranty, but what if it’s not?

A quick internet search using your laptops make and model will give you a huge list of potential providers of replacement batteries and videos showing how to crack open your laptop and replace it. The problem with the majority of these sellers is that they will be selling third party manufactured batteries and that’s something that we at Beaming would NOT recommend.  While you may be lucky and get one that works a significant proportion will either be of a lower capacity that the original, have fitment issues when trying to install it or in the worst case be electrically unsafe and potentially a fire risk.

For these reasons, we would ALWAYS recommend buying a genuine manufacturer battery, ideally from the manufacturer (Dell and HP are very good at supplying parts like this via there website) or through an authorised reseller, whose details are supplied by the manufacturer.

Once you have your genuine replacement battery, we come onto the subject of replacing it. There are a huge number of videos online that will show you this for different laptop models, rather than explaining here.  But. what we do recommend is that as with all repairs of electrical equipment you should make sure the device is unplugged from all power sources and that you are earthed with an anti-static band.  We also recommend a good quality computer repair tool kit that includes pry tools etc. to help get the case open.