You couldn't buy something from eBay or TaoBao/Alibaba?

I did in fact buy a knock-off from ebay battery, but it kept it kept it's charge for hilariously little time. Had to run it of mains power permanently (ran it as a little server for a while).

Don't know your exact timing but I run basically on Dells Latitude laptops for past 2 decades. Since its just for travel and not my primary workhorse, I buy used corporate ones for pittance (cca 300$ for models worth 1500 few years before), and swap battery myself for another original OEM one, they cost less than 100$ from original manufacturer. Its just 2-3 philips screws and 1 cable, anybody can do it. They last just as much as advertised on new ones and don't degrade much even after few years.

Batteries (and ie chargers) are one of the things that's utterly idiotic to shop around on chinese portals. You literally always get what you pay for (or worse) and can't punch above this threshold.

This was mid 2010s and the laptop has long since bit the dust. IIRC this was a Dell Studio 15, but I recall checking eBay for old new stock with no luck, but it doesn't surprise me that the Dell Latitudes have lots of stock floating around ebay.

If Sir is buying his lithium batteries and/or power transformers from the likes of eBay, Alibaba and Amazon, then Sir may wish to check his fire insurance is up to date.

I have bought many third party rechargable batteries from those sites over the years. Yes, slightly lower charge capacity compared to original, but no fires. And, yes, I know my sample size is small!

One ebay sourced Chinese transformer that blew its back off (!) letting our the magic smoke and tripping the RCB was enough for me.

These days I'm older and wiser.

I also had similar good experiences buying batteries on Aliexpress. The issue with those typically isn't intrinsic quality as the batteries are most of the time good but lack of quality control. Bad batteries will reach the market and this is specially dangerous with packs with many cells like e-bikes packs.

FWIW, it was the same (even at the enterprise level).

We had a commodity (local cloud) computing Dell infra in the mid 2010s and were constantly replacing/returning “simple stuff” (fans, support flanges, memory, NICs).

“Dude, you’re gettn’ a Dell” became—-nope, never again.

My sitch was around the same time period.

I feel like there are not good quality hardware company nowadays.

Dell: the land of motherboard dying and dog shit trackpads.

Asus: dead soldered RAM.

Most BIOS: too long to boot, it's fucking 2024 what is your BIOS doing it needs more than 2s to boot? It was taking the same time to boot 30 years ago.

Every mouse: double click problem due to wrong use of the actuators.

And every hardware company has to try to cram some badly designed software and require you to create an account.

Your trackpad comment brought back a memory of 6 of us in a conference room.

We all had the same OS (NT) to the same patch level, same trackpad config, and same model of Dell laptop and every _single_ trackpad felt different. They weren't strictly "defective", but just wildly disparate physical feels and responsiveness.

I will give shout-outs to: 4th gen Kindles (has physical buttons and lasts forever), first gen iPhone SE, and Microsoft Mobile Mouse 3600.

> too long to boot, it's fucking 2024 what is your BIOS doing it needs more than 2s to boot?

Me crying in first-gen Ryzen/x370 with my upward of 20 seconds POST time.

You'll love ddr5 times.

Sarcastically, or seriously? Is the issue due to memory? Training or something?

Training, till you get used to it you'll think something went wrong during boot.

Why does it take that long to post? I've had multiple Ryzen 300-series motherboards, none of them take anywhere near that long to boot outside of using something like some server-grade HBA that has its own boot step.

I have no idea, but it's a known issue, memory training maybe? It's a gaming PC so nothing special going on, ROG HERO motherboard, 32GB DDR4 (4x8GB), GTX 1080Ti.

I haven't used it much in recent years, I built it for gaming but had kids a couple of years later, now I game on whatever is convenient in the small burts I get; which is also the reason I haven't bothered upgrading it.

Why does boot time matter? Is something wrong with the sleep mode in your laptop?

> tho@phobos:/usr/local/src/sbcl$ uptime 11:31:50 up 250 days, 21:10, 1 user, load average: 0.60, 0.37, 0.40

I stupidly updated my firmware on my ThinkPad 14 running Linux and that removed the perfectly working S3 sleep and gave me a non-working ridiculous S0x instead.

> your laptop

I kinda like my desktops.

Is there something wrong with the sleep mode on your desktop?

I miss the laptops from Toshiba. Decent price and very reliable, easy to upgrade.

I would tepidly recommend lenovo, they support the firmware for a long time and most things work. Warranty is what you decide to buy. Designs tend to be pretty serviceable but it varies in the models and over the years.