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My family ordered an inexpensive (roughly $20) replacement battery for our Dell Inspiron 5721 around a year ago. It has progressively performed worse and worse, now yielding less than half of an hour of use per full charge. The battery that we had before it, its factory battery, lasted for around six years. Is this normal? Furthermore, could any of these scenarios or a combination of them affect the battery life this significantly:

  • leaving the computer on a cushioned surface and heating up the laptop, hurting the battery
  • using the high performance power plan instead of the balanced plan
  • building up dust inside the laptop for 6-7 years
  • the battery is cheap and we should have bought a more expensive one

We are debating whether or not a much more expensive replacement is the best solution, so any advice will help.

Thank you,

Lee

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  • Perhaps the charger is at fault.
    – spikey_richie
    Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 16:18
  • @spikey_richie The laptop charges fine. It is when it is unplugged that we are having problems. The only issue that I know it has is the outer black covering slipping off of the underlying wires near where the charger is plugged into the laptop itself.
    – Lee
    Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 16:22
  • My experience is that cheapie replacement batteries suck. Only the OEM ones seem to work like they are supposed to.
    – Señor CMasMas
    Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 17:02
  • What did you expect for $20?
    – Moab
    Commented Jan 8, 2020 at 12:05

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Your replacement pack may not have as many cells in it for capacity (Watt hours, but often expressed as milliamp hours [mAh] when the voltage is fixed or implicit [Volts * Amps * hours = Wh]). Easiest way to check is by comparing the spec on the battery with the spec on an OEM battery.

However, usage plays a huge role in battery life:

Heating up from being on a cushioned surface forces system to run fan at higher speeds for longer. Fans eat battery.

"High performance mode" is vague, but it probably results in the system relying on fan speed to cool before down-clocking the CPU to stay cool. See above.

Down-clocking the CPU is a power-saving tool. High performance mode may be set up to run CPU at highest frequency or limit how low the frequency can be set. High CPU frequency means more power usage.

LCD backlight set to 100% while unplugged eats battery.

Six-year old processors may struggle more with daily browsing, as many websites have a lot heavier client-side processing and JS than six years ago. Without adblock, some sites can push CPU very hard.

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  • For the usage ideas you presented, while they can eat power, do they also eat at the battery's lifespan? In other words, would they be the reason why the replacement battery has progressively gotten worse over the past year rather than just performing worse from day one?
    – Lee
    Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 16:57
  • You need to actually establish there is a problem with the battery and is not attributable to usage or configuration. There may be ghost/hidden processes (use Process Monitor (from microsoft) in admin mode), there may have been a configuration change (someone may have disabled "power off" states for devices), someone may have toggled "metered connection" feature in win-10, etc.. I have seen someone's phone battery life plummet to 30 mins off charge which was fixed by factory reset (either a bug or device security was compromised). Short battery is not an indication of failure per se.
    – Yorik
    Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 17:54

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