Replacement battery question

Hello,

Here's my situation:

I have an old Pavillion N5430, that I should probably upgrade, but I'm living in France right now, and don't want to buy an AZERTY-keyboard notebook. Besides, I think I'll buy a desktop when I get back to the US permanently anyway. Plus, I've added memory and a bigger disk to the Pavilion, and - honestly - it does everything I need right now anyway. Only problem is that the battery was original, so 5 or 6 years old, and could only hold about a 30 second charge, so I thought I'd buy a replacement battery and have a functional machine to hold me over for the year or so til I'm back in the US. So I ordered a new battery for when I was home over Christmas and carried it back to France with me, put it in place, charged it up and everything looked peachy. But when I unplugged it from AC to take it into my TV room to do a little work, it just stopped abruptly. Not a gentle shut down - just bang, dead, after a couple of minutes. Before it died though, the battery was showing 100% full, so I don't think it's anything to do with it not charging. It seems to be more of a compatibility problem, even though the site where I bought it definitely says it's supposed to be compatible (and it fits perfectly in the slot). Problem is, when the notebook dies, it dies so abruptly that it screws up some files, so I actually reloaded the disk image (which I'd backed up). I tried it a couple of times more, and the computer dies regularily when running on battery power (fine on AC) after 30 seconds to 5 minutes or so of activity. Sometimes I have to take the battery completely out to try re-booting. I've stopped this because I can't imagine that it's easy on my poor old laptop. Now the question.

Is it worth it to try reordering another replacement battery? Could it be that I just got a bad one? Does that happen (bad batteries)? I guess I'm thinking that it's a simple device that they are never "bad", in which case it doesn't do any good to try again. Maybe the replacements just aren't 100% compatible (and HP doesn't sell originals anymore for this model)

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

 

Have you tried cleaning your contacts real good to make sure it makes good contact and nothing is bent ?

 

Umh, I was thinking something more complicated than that, but that would explain why I have to remove the battery sometimes to reboot. Perhaps in taking it out and putting it back in, I make better contact. On the other hand, not sure why it would just conk out when I'm not touching it. And the battery seems to charge ok. But a good suggestion anyway. Thanks.

I looked at the contacts and they don't seem to be bent to the naked eye. What would you use to clean the contacts?

 

I would use what I clean ram contacts with, the eraser (red) on the back of a pencil on the M/B side first (contacts) - test it and clean the battery contacts - The only other thing I can think of is that connection for the battery to the motherboard has come loose and may need to be soddered back on (would require ripping apart the lappy and examining and pulling out the sodder and iron if necessary ) this happens a lot with the wall warts because people like to rip them in and out of the laptop so frequently or the cable bends from the way the laptop sits at times -
Hope that helps ya out -