More Thought on Dell's Recent Battery Policy

After mulling over the situation for the past couple of days, I have considered another course of action if I want to keep purchasing Dell laptops: When I buy a new laptop, just add two replacement batteries to the cart to keep the life of the laptop going well past the five years they will support them.

This does not mean I am remaining exclusively with Dell has been my practice. Extra batteries from Dell are three times the perfectly good third-party replacements found on Amazon. I will be doing a little more investigation into other companies like Lenovo and HP. If they allow for generic replacement batteries to be used without a BIOS block, then they are definitely a better investment.

I did spend some time yesterday evening disassembling an official Dell battery (which was dead). I thought maybe I could either swap out the actual lithium-ion packs or extract whatever circuitry which identified the units as officially Dell. The batteries are not a something that can be simply disassembled. Neither of those theories were feasible.