Recently I installed a new battery in my old laptop, and thought it’d be cool to share. For your information I installed a new battery in a laptop that is 4+ years old and the battery had wiped down to only lasting for about an hour. So what’d I do?
First I went and opened up the laptop. I have to warn you this is very dangerous, and you need to be very careful when you do this. I powered down the machine, and then made sure it was unplugged, and got some speciality screw drivers to help. My laptop has star pattern screws so I had to go to Lowe’s and get a screwdriver that had that size. I belive its T5 for mine.
So turned the laptop over, took off the back and got to the battery. I looked at the serial number on the battery and did a quick search on Ebay and Amazon. I decided to go for Amazon becuase I wanted a new battery instead of one that could potentially be old. It worked out becuase I had some Amazon gifit cards so the originally $54 purchase ended up being about $28. Ordered it online and it came a few days later.
So now for the fun part.
I was super excited to take out the old one and put it in. I didn’t think about the fact that laptops are incredibly sensitive inside, and you may accidentally disconnect something and not realize it. So anyway, I unhooked the old battery, installed the new battery, tested it and wooo it worked! I ran the laptop that night and it was running for more than 2 hours (since then I’ve proven that it is working for long periods consistently). I thought everything was good. Here’s a picture of the laptop battery being installed.
Then I tried to go onliine.
Apparently the connector to my wireless antenna instide my laptop got hit when I was installed new battery. As a result, power did not go to the antenna, so try as I may I couldn’t connect to the internet. I spent a lot of time running ifconfig and other utilities through the terminal thinking it was a driver issue. Then after I got back home a day later I reinstalled Ubuntu thinking hey that’ll fix it. Nope. Then I realized that I think it might’ve been something inside that had unhooked. So I opened the laptop back up only to realize that it was the connector. I made sure the power connection to the antenna was good and tight and it worked. Also as a side note one of the USB ports near it had also stopped working, this fixed that as well.
So now, I have a nice laptop all setup with a nice battery. I reinstalled Ubuntu on it again, and got it running and now have a laptop that I would’ve otherwise gone out and bought. Saved myself several hundred dollars (a new laptop purchase) for a project that was about $50 total. Also should mention that I had to go out and get a second screwdriver set because the very small star pattern screwdriver is very sensitive and had partially stripped. Fortunately the set is only $5 at Lowe’s so it only cost me a little more. Overall, I recommend this to anyone considering getting rid of an old laptop. When you upgrade the hardware you save yourself a lot of money, and make good use of what you have!
