I always carried a 2nd charged battery for my Dell laptop. Slide three plastic tabs and the old one popped out.
Changing a laptop battery was a 2 minute job. My older Win 10, Dell Laptop was manufactured in 2017.
I bought a newer, faster, “New to me” Win 11, Dell Latitude 5420. Made in 2021. Dell Latitude is a corporate, business laptop.
Dell Latitude is on our state purchasing contract. All our state agencies purchase from it.
This is beyond pathetic. Remove eight screws, pry off the back, Unplug a fragile power cable. Slide the battery from a slot. Install new battery. Is this some kind of sick joke?
What happened to hot swapping batteries? What if I’m doing a powerpoint presentation at a computer conference and need to swap batteries? A battery charge isn’t going to get me through a busy 8 hour day at a conference.
Most importantly, why is technology getting worse and more useless every damn year?
My daily use laptop is the semi-ruggedized version of yours. I was considering upgrading it to two high-capacity batteries, but after looking at the online instructions … decided that procrastinating was, by far, the better path
Generally, most laptops now come this way. You have to search for a swappable battery. Laptops are built very slim, light weight and efficient. So your preferred shorter life batteries in large non-efficient laptops are basically gone.
It is a pain, but mostly it isn’t.
Next time you buy a laptop look for a “rugged enterprise notebooks” and hopefully they will still have the swap. Ironically, Dell is a likely source for said with both field and military grade laptops available.
The number of people who need this feature is effectively non existent. Those who do need to buy and pay more for a laptop with this feature. Everyone else prefers a less expensive laptop.
Buy an external battery at Best Buy or whatever that plugs directly into the power port or maybe USB port. It’s even faster than swapping the old style batteries.
The number of people who need this feature is effectively non existent. Those who do need to buy and pay more for a laptop with this feature. Everyone else prefers a less expensive laptop.
Buy an external battery at Best Buy or whatever that plugs directly into the power port or maybe USB port. It’s even faster than swapping the old style batteries.
An internal battery is better in every way except ease of replacement. It’s a great example of an engineering optimization principle: Make the common case easy, make the uncommon case possible.
Ehh, you can say that, and it might be true for you, but the same thing won’t be true for others.
I have a 2013 or so Toughbook. It’s battery died last year to the point where it wouldn’t even boot with the power adapter plugged in, but otherwise was a perfectly functional laptop. Instead of taking it apart and swapping the battery, I ordered a replacement and swapped it out in a few seconds. Without that capability, it would probably have been recycled (I’ve taken laptops apart and fixed them before, I’d rather not do it again). There’s no technological reason why this can’t be the procedure on modern laptops. It’s only done that way because it’s cheaper.
It also makes the packaging of the battery itself more flexible and the whole laptop both smaller and lighter. Laptop batteries in a case are bigger and heavier than a bare LiPo pack. Laptops that have to have invididual docks for batteries instead of flexible packs made to fit the space are bigger and heavier. Smaller and lighter are what sells laptops these days.
The USB-C brick is the superior choice as that brick can be used for every device I own and is simpler to charge on its own when not in use.
Eh, I’d say that it is in some respects and laptop self-servicing is definitely one of them. Harder to open/access, fewer user replaceable parts and even stuff that used to be standard user-upgradable like storage and memory often isn’t any more. Manufacturers have a vested interest in either making you pay more up front for that stuff since you can’t easily do it yourself later or making the laptop obsolete quicker so you buy a new one.
The price of tech has gone way down over the decades and it’s in large part because of cheaper manufacturing. I’m saying this as a career manufacturing engineer
Exactly. The newest Macbook Pros, for example, have a 20+ hour battery life for continuous light web browsing on the 16 inch model and 17-18 hours for the 14 inch model. My couple year old M3 MPB continues to last well more than a work day for me.
and of note, since they started soldering in RAM, I haven’t had an issue with RAM coming unseated or having the connector fail. It was rare before but it did happen to me more than once.
