Pack Replacement

Pack Replacement

The part affected by the recall is the battery pack

Geyserville essentially allows notebooks to run with desktop-like performance when plugged into an outlet, and at lower power when relying on batteries. This will allow high-performance machines, which normally are very hard on batteries, to achieve the two-hour battery life of a lower-performance system, according to Brookwood.

"Our tests found that 40 percent of consumers over three years have replaced laptop HP NX9000 Battery up to five times. If each is $150, that's almost the cost of the whole system," she said. "I think this will change the appetite for sustainable products. Instead of purchasing something expendable, they can have something that lasts."

Panasonic doesn't discuss the materials being used to build that cell, but it is one of many companies investigating the use of metals other than lithium, such as nickel and manganese, on the cathode of the battery, said Andy Keaths, power sources enabling manager at Intel.

The whole idea of a 3-pound laptop computer is to use it while traveling and this often means computing for hours away from electrical outlets. Many people carry an extra battery. Fellow CNET blogger, Gordon Haff recently wrote that he carries two extra batteries when he travels with his ultra-portable laptop. As a Seinfeld fan, let me put it this way: no spare battery for you, MacBook Air owners.

The part affected by the recall is the NX9000 Battery pack, not the notebook itself, so put away those hopes for a free system upgrade. Sony manufactures all of the battery cells and most of the battery packs used in the affected Dell notebooks. The company says it has received six reports of property damage from overheating notebooks, but other reports say far more incidents have occurred.

At CNET Reviews this week we kept our eyes on the budget, with in-depth looks at the $849 Toshiba Satellite M205 as well as the $899 Fujitsu LifeBook V1010. CNET blogger Michael Horowitz dispensed advice about purchasing replacement laptop batteries. Gadgette Molly Wood posted a few resources for women's laptop bags. And Crave Asia's Reuben Lee shared a port replicator that connects to your laptop via the ExpressCard slot.

"We had anticipated the effect, but the device produced a voltage over a hundred times too big and for tens of minutes, rather than for milliseconds as we had expected," said one of the researchers, in a story in ScienceDaily. "That this was counterintuitive is what lead to our theoretical understanding of what was really going on."

It won't happen this year, but experiments are under way that could lead to these products being available in the near future.

This time around, the Consumer Product Safety Commission says 1,400 of the lithium-ion batteries containing Sony-made cells sold with Toshiba laptops pose a fire hazard. There have been three reports of models with those HP Compaq NX9000 Battery overheating in other countries, but none of the incidents caused injury, according to the CPSC.

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