Repair a Laptop Battery

DISCLAIMER:
crackinhack.blogspot.com nor I will be responsible in any way if this article leads you to do something that causes harm in any way, either to a person or property. Thus they nor I will be liable if such an event happens, and by proceeding with the instructions listed in this article you verify that you understand these risks and accept these terms.
Ok so I'm writing another article, because as I have said before, I have no life. So anyway, because I've been procrastinating studying for finals I have been doing a lot more with my computers lately
The last thing I did was to rebuild my laptop battery, and while you might not call it "hacking" I saved myself about $100 on a new laptop battery, and considering we all use computers here, I thought this might be helpfull to a lot of people out there.
What this article will teach you is if your laptop battery is not holding a charge, how to repair it and make it like new again, for either free or a lot cheaper than buying a new one
Note: If you're not experienced with soldering, and electricity you might not want to attempt this because if you do it wrong bad things can happen. I feel that I should list some of the things that can go wrong to try and deter the unexperienced
1. The battery can explode
2. The battery can catch on fire
3. Battery acid can leak on you
4. You can short out your laptop
And thats just to name a few
If you are experienced with things like this (it doesnt even have to be to this level, but I mean expereinced with soldering, and working with batteries and understand a little on how electricity works) as well as you take the proper precautions, this process is very simple. As I am nowhere near an electrical engineer and I was able to do it relativly without a problem. However if you are not experienced, or do not feel confident on this at all I can not stress enough that this project can go bad very quickly and why I felt it necissary to write the above disclamer.
Note: This process involves cutting open your laptop battery, now while some batteries can be re-closed, others can not, and would either have to be glued or taped, so if you dont like this possibility, dont try this
Note2: ok this is the last note in the intro, i have been told that on some newer laptop betteries there are anti-tamper devices, if a battery is disconnected from the unit it will no longer work. This method is still valid in this case, but its much harder, because you must always have all the sets of cells together
************************ *********************What you will need:
1. Old laptop battery you wish to fix
2. Knife/Razor blade
3. Soldering Iron (I prefer a soldering gun)& Solder (if not using an
expensive soldering iron go for low heat solder)
4. New battery cells/another working laptop battery with the same cells that you dont need any more
5. Glue/Tape (I recommend gorilla glue, because it is really strong)
6. Tin strips (or any other metal both conductive and solder can stick to)
7. Multi-Meter (The cells are not always clearly labeled which side is
positive and negative, this will help tell, while there are tricks to do this without a multimeter for the $10 I found it for in the store I thought it well worth it)
************************ *********************Getting Started:
1. Go ahead and open up your laptop battery, to do this cut around the battery on the seam. After you have cut around the full battery try and pry it open. If you're confident you broke the seal, the two pieces are fused together, rather than overlaped, and to close it you will need to either glue it or tape it shut, if this is the case, keep cutting carefully, makeing sure you do not puncture one of the cells inside, until you get it open
2. Look for any markings on the batteries you see inside, if you get lucky you will see a marking indicating how many volts each cell is. Usually its
3.6 V, also you may see it say something like 1200mAh
What that number means is 1200 milliamps, this number and the number on your replacement cells dont need to match, to put it generally, the larger this number is, the longer the battery will retain a charge
If your cell does not state the voltage, remember that google is your friend go ahead and throw the information that is on the cell into google and you should hopefully find the information that you are looking for.
3 . Finding replacement cells- Well one of the easiest things you can do is go ahead and search google for the type of cells that you have and then find them on a website and buy them (I will tell you that I searched stores like CircuitCity, 2 Radio Shacks, Sears, Staples, and a store called Batteries Plus in several different cities, and no one had the ones I needed, so unless you KNOW a store by you has them dont waste your time with anything but online)
Depending on your laptopbattery you might have anyware from 6 to over 12 cells, just for a comparason I found the cells that my laptop used for $5.00 a pop online (so for mine it would have cost me $30 plus shipping, a hell of a lot cheaper than say a new battery that most likely sells for over $100) Another thing you can do is use an old laptop battery if you KNOW that the battery still holds a charge, take it appart and compare the cells
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