Laptop Thoughts: A Slightly Expensive Mistake With a Laptop Battery

I think cautionary tales are a good way to learn, so here's one for you: several years back, I bought a Toshiba M50 laptop for my wife. It worked well enough for her needs, and a few years later I sold it to my younger sister who was looking for a basic computer. She's been using it ever since, but of course by now the battery can't hold a charge longer than a few minutes. She was complaining it was even slower than normal, so I took a look, cleared out some junk and a few virii (Windows XP...sigh) and brought it back up to speed (such that it is).

I also decided to be a nice big brother and buy her a new battery - I was surprised they were only about $50, which is much cheaper than the $130 or so I dropped on a battery for my XPS M1330 a year ago. So I found the battery for the M50, ordered it, and when it arrived I quickly tried to insert it...and the battery wouldn't quite fit. I thought "Damn cheap batteries not made to spec, guess I need to give it a little shove here."

I managed to get it inserted, but the laptop wasn't reporting it was recharging the battery. The next day I ended up calling the battery company, and they confirmed that I'd ordered the wrong laptop battery. Toshiba had several different versions of the M50, and bizarrely, they decided to use slightly different batteries in all of them - even though from a casual glance, they looked identical. I ordered the correct battery, shipped back the old one, and waited for the RMA credit to be put back on my VISA.

Well, as you can tell from the photo above, I managed to damage the battery by trying to force it to fit. The company quite rightly refused to give me a credit because of my boneheaded move. And now I know two things: make sure when ordering a laptop battery you get exactly the right one, and if a battery doesn't fit easily in a laptop, don't force it.

Got any laptop battery stories of your own to share?