It’s a great development and medium-level gaming system. Not that the specs are overtly mouthwatering: 120GB hard drive, dual-core AMD 64bit (each core about 1.8GHZ), 1GB of RAM, 128 ATI Xpress GPU. It can run MediaMonkey, Netbeans (for writing my Java), ActiveState Komodo (for PHP development) [info], Firefox, and FileZilla (FTP client) at the same time on dual-monitors. My 1501 can also put in it’s time running Halo.

Recently though, the battery has been acting up. The problem started out with the BIOS spurting out an error message at bootup, which I though was merely a glitch:

WARNING: The battery cannot be identified.
This system will be unable to charge this battery.
Press Any Key to Continue
Press 2 times to enter SETUP
Press and Any Key to enter Boot Menu

I figured I could fix this up with a quick update to the Phoenix BIOS (via a Windows utility) which my laptop was in need of. Remember kiddies, when flashing your BIOS, follow all the instructions or live in fear of creating a fancy paper-weight.

So I updated the BIOS to version 2.6.3. No more battery error messages, but my PC was still acting up. The battery wouldn’t hold charge and XP (32bit and 64bit) would be unresponsive to my keyboard and mouse clicks/movements while the battery was installed. I decided to pop out the battery and see if it would run faster, which it did.

All in all, the battery just was getting old and would no longer hold charge. I thought that my battery might last more than a year, since I had been keeping to plenty of battery best practices.

Last night, I ended up buying a new battery for my 1501, from this seller by the name of batteryfordell, who only sells Dell batteries. My question is, how and where does he get these brand new batteries for so little money? Regardless, I ended up paying $70 compared to the $300 that Dell wanted on their website. For pretty much the equivalant part.

Sweet deal :-)

Note: Although I got a great deal on the battery, the shipping and handling time was well over 2 weeks. The guy made excuses, like my address wasn’t correct and shit like that. I even called him a couple of times, but to no avail. He was just making excuses because he probably didn’t have the part in stock. I did end up getting my battery.