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Hello I have a Dell Lattitude E5440 laptop which is around 4 years old. The battery seems to be on its last legs as it is not holding charge and the power manager says the battery health is 'fair'.
Recently I have been getting a strange blue screen saying " your pc ran into a problem and needs to restart. We're just collecting some info, and then we'll restart for you, 100% complete.....stop code pnp detected fatal error". It never restarts and just hangs on the blue screen.
So, looking to replace the battery. The only time we have tried to replace a laptop battery, was on my wife's laptop, and the battery never worked and IIRC crashed the computer rather than just offering insufficient power. So....
Any recommendations for a new battery, or how to work out which make is going to work and which one isn't. I travel overseas a lot for work, to remote mine locations etc. so need reliability for my work, and as a contractor I cannot rely on my IT dept. etc.
I know it is getting long in the tooth, but it seems to work fine, apart form overheating etc, and I can't afford to replace it at present.
They are a bit of a lottery - I've found you get what you pay for.
You can buy an original Dell battery on Amazon for £80-100 - that should get you guaranteed compatibility and some sort of guarantee should it fail in the first year or so.
You could also buy a "compatible" battery for around £30-40 - from my experience I wouldn't bother, they have a much higher failure rate.
Edit: Also, before you go spending any money, maybe an os refresh/restore might be in order.
Not sure the problems are related - if the problem occurs when plug into mains then definitely not. However if you decide you do want a new battery then the official route is probably the best, followed by an established seller of third-party batteries e.g. www.laptopsandspares.com (I have bought from these with no issue). Don't go buying off some random ebay seller as performance, quality and lifetime will likely be poor.
Thanks,
noted about the issues not being connected, however there seems to be some plausible connection: for example running off mains, then unplugging and shutting down seems to bring the error message up. It doesn't really happen in use. Only when trying to shut down.
Also, the laptop just shuts down rather than plug in charger type error messages.
The power profile will likely have settings whereby when the battery gets to certain levels it will try to hibernate or shut down. If the battery health is bad it might try and hibernate/shutdown but fail to complete due to lack of juice. It might be worth having a look at these settings to see if the behaviour you observe might be changed by altering the settings (Critical Battery Level and Critical Battery Action in Windows 7).
Bought a replacement battery for my work laptop from https://laptopbattery.co.uk/ as they were close enough that I could pick it up in person. Really nice guy, and the battery he supplied has a longer life than the factory one, so I'm happy!
Many thanks for all your help. This place continues to be the fountain of all knowledge! Have a great end of week and weekend.
Dan
Incidentally,
When the system bluescreens it should create a diagnostic dump in c:\Windows\minidump. If you can get that file to me (email should be in my profile) I can potentially take it to bits and tell you what's causing the crash.
I got one of These a couple of weeks ago. Thought I'd risk it for 15 quid due to a UK seller, dispatched from the UK and with decent feedback. I've lucked out, it lasts well doesn't trigger any compatibility messages and doesn't run hot to cause me any safety concerns.
tthew it could be a good battery, but really it takes more than 2 weeks to find out.
I bought a cheapo one and it lasted fine initially, but after 6 months it wouldn't hold a charge.
Cougar,
nothing in the minidump folder for now.