SWMBO has a Toshiba laptop computer (Tecra A8-EZ8311) whose battery (PA3285U-3BRS) has reached the end of its service life.

I can buy a replacement battery from Toshiba, but because there are 19 reviews of the battery on Toshiba's own website, every one of which rates it one star out of five with claimed battery life of 15 minutes or so, this does not seem like a wise course of action.

Is there some great website that everybody but me knows about that sells replacement laptop batteries that are decent quality at reasonable prices?

What should I do?

tanstaafl.

You don't get much choice to be honest. You buy the original battery. There are third party batteries for some of the more popular models/brands but I'm not sure I'd trust those since most of them pretend to be official ones.

Dead batteries are a sign that you want, no need a shiny new laptop.

We've purchased no-name replacement batteries for a couple of notebooks here.

The first attempt was for an IBM Thinkpad, years and *years* ago. The new battery worked, but would only charge when the notebook was actually powered on and running. Weird.

Much more recently (Edit: one year ago), we bought a no-name battery for an old Dell notebook. Cheap, works perfectly. Zero issues.

I write the Thinkpad incident off as an anomaly. These days (since 2002, at least), with more standardized notebook chipsets and less trickery/hackery in them, I'd go no-name for any replacement batteries.

Heck, if I can get the battery shell open, I might even just replace the cells inside the factory battery pack.

Cheers

eBay.

There seem to be only about two or three aftermarket laptop battery manufacturers, so it probably doesn't make a lot of difference where you buy them from. I usually try Froogle.

No, Bitt. "Google Products" or "Google Shopping."

Froogle was such a better name that those. I still type in froogle.com when I want to go to the site, though.

I went with this one. $3.00 more than eBay, but $10 less for shipping, and Amazon gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling of trustworthiness.

Thanks, all, for the advice.

tanstaafl.

Happy birthday.

Thank you.

As my son just pointed out to me, I am now 2 ^ 6 years old.

tanstaafl.