What's more sensible; buying a new battery for my laptop, or try to repair the current one?

[BurntArepa]

On its own, the question I am making is a bit confusing, so let me add the respective context.

 

I bought my current laptop on late October of 2019, so it's out of warranty. It's an HP Pavilion Laptop, model 15-cs1001. I bought it as it had the largest battery of all options I had at time of purchase, while also having a decent display and selection of ports, and also having the second-fastest dGPU amongst all. The machine has served me well, I even upgraded the memory from the default 8 GB to 16 GB, and replaced the SSD with an actually decent one. It's worlds apart compared to my previous machine that had a passively-cooled Celeron and I used for five years.

 

The computer was working fine until this January, when a electrical issue with a voltage stabilizer I had it plugged into ocurred while I tried to use its kill-switch, which was faulty. As that happened, I tested the computer to see if it still worked by turning it on while still plugged to the wall (it was in a desktop setup connected to an external monitor, so I didn't bother to unplug it). Since it booted up just fine, I thought nothing catastrophic had happened, and I left it at that.

 

The next day I had the laptop with me in a bag, while at my grandmother's, and I tried powering it on. Nothing. I plugged it in a wall socket, and it booted fine. I figured it had discharged and just needed to be charged back up, but when I got to the lock screen I saw there was 90% left. Weird. I unplugged it, and it immediately shut down. That got me very alarmed. When I got back home, I opened it up, and started looking for anything weird inside the board, but obviously I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Unplugging the battery and plugging it back in did nothing, and powering it on from just AC in showed that the computer could detect if the batery was still present or not.

 

It is worth noting that the battery only had gone through like 100 charge cycles and was out of warranty for 2 months when the incident happened. Moreover, removing the battery resets the internal clock and CMOS, but even though I can't use my laptop with battery power, it somehow still has enough of a charge to be at 39% (vastly surpassing HP's claim of 30-day standby, as it's been months, showing that it isn't fully discharging and perhaps is still receiving a charge from the power brick) *and* keep all CMOS data intact when plugged in. This indicated that the cells themselves are probably fine, and it could be an issue with either the battery control circuit or the power delivery section in the mainboard.

 

With that in mind, I was thinking to try and see if I could diagnose my way around the battery PCB, or leave to someone (assuming I can find such a person on my little Colombian town) that job. I would buy a replacement battery, but HP has long since stopped selling the damn thing, none of their authorized centers has ever gotten back to me after inquiring, and I could find units from overseas that are quite expensive and will arrive in like a million years, which just isn't feasible as I am going back to in-person next semester and the *entire point I bought this computer* was to have a long-lasting battery so that I could carry the thing around without having to plug whenever I needed to do anything, as was the case with my old laptop.

 

Is there any possibility a repair could be performed to get it working again, or do I have no choice but to take a small loan and order the battery from god-knows-where?

[Eigenvektor]

If the cells are fine as you say, it should be possible to repair it. But if you have no prior experience with electronics I don't think you'll realistically be able to diagnose the issue unless there's visible damage to one of its components. Finding someone with that type of experience would be the best bet. It's also entirely possible that diagnostics and repair (+spare parts) is going to be more expensive than simply buying a new one.

 

(As an aside, 30-day standby doesn't mean the battery can hold its charge for 30 days. It means you can put your computer to sleep and it should still be able to wake up after 30 days. Standby still uses power to keep memory active so you can resume very quickly.)

[SorryBella]

Quote

What's more sensible; buying a new battery for my laptop, or try to repair the current one?

In a perfect world where you have everything and know everything? Repairing would make more sense. But in a real world buying a new one always makes more sense because of how dangerous repairing battery cells can be sometimes.

[K2K Tech Reviews]

AAAAAAAA PLS DONT TRY TO REPAIR IT!!! That’s kinda dangerous without the right kinda training and experience. I’d just replace it. That’s the sensible option.