My laptop’s battery has clearly aged over the years (like milk, not wine) and it’s starting to become a problem in everyday use. When normally I can easily get through the day with maybe 20-30% remaining, Now my laptop always dies around 3:00, give or take an hour depending on usage. (And I’m not doing many heavy tasks either - mainly web browsing, doing schoolwork, occasionally watching a few internet videos, that sort of thing. I don’t play many games, and the ones I do play aren’t that intensive, stuff like Minecraft. I don’t play any “AAA” games - who came with that anyways? It’s a really stupid label. What gives a game 3 As, and why isn’t there too many “AA”, “A”, or “B-E” games? Why not just call them corporate games or similar, since many indie games are just as good, if not better, without using over a hundred gigabytes of storage and being super inefficient…)
When I ran upower, these are the statistics that were produced:
native-path: BAT0
vendor: ASUSTeK
model: UP3404VA
serial: 123456789
power supply: yes
has history: yes
has statistics: yes
battery
present: yes
rechargeable: yes
state: discharging
warning-level: none
energy: 28.2173 Wh
energy-empty: 0 Wh
energy-full: 48.655 Wh
energy-full-design: 75.0868 Wh
voltage-min-design: 7.971 V
capacity-level: Normal
energy-rate: 6.95868 W
voltage: 7.971 V
charge-cycles: 823
time to empty: 4.1 hours
percentage: 58%
capacity: 64.7983%
technology: lithium-polymer
icon-name: 'battery-good-symbolic'
The battery capacity is 64.8% of original capacity, which obviously is bad. You can also see that it has sustained over 800 charge cycles (which I assume is a lot. A quick search online shows that someone with around 600 cycles on their laptop being told to replace the battery). Interestingly, the serial is “123456789”, which is probably some placeholder and the actual serial number couldn’t be found. I wonder why.
My search for the specific battery model that my laptop requires led me to a random teardown article, where they briefly shows the battery with the model #, which is C22N2107, a 75Wh pack. I can find a bunch of third-party replacements online, but no Asus-branded ones.
Given that my battery has clearly aged, should I get an aftermarket battery replacement? Are third-party batteries safe to use? Asus doesn’t seem to sell the battery on their e-store, and there’s no chance that Asus will offer to replace it for a reasonable amount of money (plus, my warranty is expired by now).
Are third-party batteries any good, and are they safe to use?
3rd party batteries are rarely dangerous. They usually just kinda suck. They lie about their capacity, they degrade quicker than OEM.
Your battery is at the point where I’d start to consider getting a replacement. Just know that if you sort by price low to high you could get a battery worse than your current one. But buying expensive doesn’t mean you’ll get a good one either. They’re kinda just hit or miss.
That is a suitable replacement. It is a simple pouch battery with an easy connector so the actual physical work to replace it is fairly simple and the cost is very low for the convenience of using your system for long hours. It should also prolong the life of your laptop delaying replacement for a fairly long time.
The big question is about the quality of the internals of the battery. Is the material consistently folded? Are there overhangs or under hangs? Are there areas where the anode and cathode are close and will short in a few years of usage? I honestly don’t know how to actually check for this.
there’s nothing wrong with 3rd party batteries, if it’s worn down so badly that it no longer does the thing that it is supposed to then replace it, idk why it’s a question. I replace mine when they’re at 60% of original capacity
The most important question about if you should replace the battery doesn’t concern the battery stats, it concerns the physical health of the battery:
Has it started swelling?
If it has, then yes, it is important to replace the battery, if it hasn’t, now you can consider the stats.
I am a professional IT technician, and this is professional advice.
Fortunately, the battery is not puffy and swollen up. No protruding bumps can be seen.
Are we going to tell him to crack open the pack and replace the individual cells that go bad, it’s usually safe with decent soldering, and an average volt/ohm meter to verify.
(Much cheaper than replacing many batteries as well).
Edit: thought I should say many batteries have moved away from that build.
Are we going to tell him to crack open the pack and replace the individual cells that go bad, it’s usually safe with decent soldering, and an average volt/ohm meter to verify.
No.
Laptops nowadays almost always use pouch cells.
Honestly that just sounds worse. Why not use universal individually replaceable components unless you are trying to make a have to buy from us unique product
- Customers demand thinner laptops, standard cells won’t fit.
- on HP and Dell’s professional laptops you can fairly easily replace the battery, they even publish service manuals with pictures showing how to do it.
So you are pro proprietary items, anti universal parts? I just think it’s a bad choice overall. I understand they make a battery wrap around components to make it fit, but overall I think it hurts the consumer
There are plenty times when custom solutions are better than generic ones.
Weather or not this is one such time can be debated.
All I noted in my last post was to explain reality.
Generic battery cells in laptops have been dead for a many years now.
Customers won’t accept a laptop thick enough to fit a battery of 18650 cells anymore.
I recently ordered a high power workstation for a user, a Zbook with a U9 cpu and 64GB of ram, that was just maybe 5mm thicker than the normal EliteBook 840 we buy, and holy shit, it felt really old when carrying it.
Yeah to me I don’t understand it either. But that’s personal choice. Then again I’m mostly an anti laptop person. Desktops make sense to me, laptops are the laissez faire I want to be a desktop but am demanding to much mobility for a function best performed in a localized hardwired intranet environment. With video games going mostly online I feel it has brought personal computers into a more internet focused setup and less of a local install hard computing get it done space. Thus exactly what companies like Amazon/Microsoft/etc want, creating a subscription based thin/zero client with a subscription to access anything.
Id say fuck the battery unless it’s for backup power, and still fuck it then if you don’t have your environment set up to run locally, as internet won’t work when the modems go out. Is it outdated concepts, sure… But it’s only outdated because marketing has pushed us that way in my opinion
Precisely. Sadly, that’s not a decision made by anyone that would frequent this comment section.
I replaced a dell xps13 with a battery from ifixit two years ago and it gave it a new lease on life. Battery went from 20mins at best, to hrs of use in a day which is amazing and it’s still going strong. So yeah, replace it and reclaim your hardware and don’t give into this disposable, planned obsolescence world.
third party batteries are generally ok, but would probably degrade faster than official asus ones.
it would be better for battery health if you keep it on 30~80% range and not drain it till 0%/charge till 100%
I haven’t had trouble with 3rd party batteries but there’s a combination of FUD and legitimate scare stories about them. For cylindrical cells, the really cheap ones are crap and this can be detect by X-ray:
https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/lumafield-shows-why-your-cheap-18650-cells-are-terrible/
IDK if there’s a similar deal with pouch cells.
Generally, replace your battery at below 50%. At 68% I’d keep using it. Maybe add a power bank if you want to keep going for longer. If 68% isn’t enough to get through your day, then 100% is at best sort of marginal.
