SC Tom wrote:

"aaaaa" wrote in message
...
I just received a new PA33838U-1BRS (?12 cell I think) battery I
bought from batterydepot.com and I am surprised that it has so short a
life in my Toshiba A75-S209 laptop.

I should say for the record that the battery arrived fully discharged,
dead as could be. That surprised me too.

But then I know nothing about Lithium ION batteries, so I am not sure
what to expect. I have read the info at
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/a..._ion_batteries

As I watch Toshiba's Power Meter, with the desktop displayed, but the
laptop sitting idle otherwise, the capacity has decreased from 97% to
50%. That says to me that I will get only two hours out of a full
battery charge. Is that normal, good, bad, or what? I also wonder
why an overnight full charge (laptop off) only charged the battery to
98%.

So - I have to ask. Is something wrong? What is normal?

Thank you

If the battery is new, and doesn't even provide the length of runtime
the old battery does, then there is a) either something wrong with the
new battery, or b) it's nowhere near the mAh rating of the old one. In
the case of 'a', send it back; in the case of 'b', you're probably SOL
unless battery depot will strike a deal with you.

Note: every new battery that I have ever had say to charge it at least
overnight before running on it.

You can't expect anything until you charge it fully, run it down till it
shuts off,
recharge it without interruption. That's supposed to calibrate the battery
meter, but sometimes it takes more cycles. Some vendors supply an app
for this.
Read the manual.
The only real measure of how long it will run is to time how long it
runs. The worse the battery, the less accurate the prediction.
The most annoying characteristic is that for bad batteries, the meter
initially drops slowly, then the system abruptly shuts off.

Another annoying issue is the AGE of the battery. Don't know how old your
laptop is, but I use laptops from 2005. Any random "new" battery I buy
may have been sitting in a container in the sun in Arizona for
5 years. They can have significant age issues even though they've
never been used.