Best deal for 6 or 12 cell battery dv6xxx replacement?

My father's standard battery died out so I'm looking at either 6 or 12 cell and I have some questions.

1) Is 12 cell considerably bigger (and of course, weighs more.. but by how much?) thn 6 cell?

I have a Lenovo laptop and have purchased the 9 cell so I sort of have an idea but I'm not sure how HP batteries work.

2) The best deal I could get is $133 (including tax and free shipping) after student discount and 15% coupon code.

Is there any better deal? I noticed there was $30 off coupon but it has expired.

 

Lots of third party vendors sell the extended 12 cell on Amazon. I just bought a 12 cell for my dv6500 for 75 dollars.. total including shipping. But they advertised 8800 MAH and it says 6500 MAH on the battery. Still testing it out. But it looks like I will get only around 3 hours or less on it which means its going back.. Most of the vendors on amazon have good support since they don't want you posting a bad rep on them. I usually get stuff a lot cheaper there. But generally speaking, you can usually get a real HP replacement battery for less then a 100 dollars on amazon. Buying it direct from HP is going to be too much. I might still keep this battery if I can get a least three hours out of it. This machine always did take a ton of power.. I think its the BT presenter mouse I use.

The 12 cell is a bit heavier but it lifts the back up which is nice since it makes it easier to type (elevated keyboard) and my fan runs less often and the machine runs cooler since the intake vents are elevated as well. That's why they call it the extended battery since it extends it off the table. It will roughly weigh twice as much being its basically two 6 cells sandwiched together. But the advantages of the 12 cell will outweigh having a heavier system IMO.

 

http://www.amazon.com/EV089AA-Lithi...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1233594489&sr=8-1

Looks like Amazon has the authentic HP 12 cell battery for $98

 

I contacted the vendor and he was sorry he sold me a 6500 MAH when it stated 8800 MAH. So he is going to send a self addressed envelope to me.. which is great since I don't want to be stuck with shipping costs on their mistake. Like I said before, the vendors on amazon generally have excellent support since they want to keep their ratings up.

I went ahead and bought another one from your link.. it comes out to 103.98 with shipping added. Not bad for the real deal 12 cell HP 8800 MAH. <<< cancelled...

EDIT.. strike that.. went here http://www.westcoastpower.net/hp2313669.htmlinstead.. its not an HP battery but its rated at 8800MAH and costs 79.95 total.. free shipping and I called and verified it was indeed an 8800 MAH before I placed the order. Personally, I generally have better luck with third party manufacturers of batteries. The hi capacity 6 cell that shipped with my dv6500 was pretty crappy.

 

Is HP battery sucks in general? Because I have Lenovo and Sony laptops and they're great. My 5 year Sony standard 6 cell battery runs 2-3 hours more than HP which I got 1 1/2 yrs ago.

 

The reviews on amazon for the HP 12 cell are good so your probably be ok. I'm a bit biased from personal experiences with bad luck with some factory Toshiba and HP batteries. However, when I purchased aftermarket batteries for my Toshiba satellite battery performance surged allot. The link I posted for westcoastpower has a great no questions asked 30 day warranty with no restock fee and a 1 year warranty on top of that with free shipping on everything regardless of price. The main thing to make sure is that it is Li-on based and the MAH is 8800. I ordered the westcoastpower battery being that the crappy Mandate 12 cell 6500 MAH is barely getting me 2.5 hours (Its going back). The dedicated GPU and BT on this machine eats power like crazy! Brand name means nothing to me, lithium is lithium as far as I'm concerned. And for the record, Sony manufactured millions of defective Li-on batteries for just about every manufacture a few years back which has high brand name recognition.

As for your personal experience battery life can depend greatly on your systems configuration. It all Depends on the manufacturer's power management, processor you have, if you have blue tooth, or a integrated GPU versus a dedicated one, screen brightness, and if you use balanced versus power saver in vista or high performance. I am forced to using balanced mode being nothing will stream on the net without skipping on power saver mode. At least with winamp player.

If you get a 8800 MAH for your DV6xxx based machine you should get between 3- 4.5 hours hours of battery life depending on your configuration. But to answer your question I think that HP's regular 6 cells suck and the hi capacity 6 cell is not much better. However, I think their HI capacity 12 cells are good. Maybe they engineer them that way to get customers to upgrade to the 12 cell. If you buy them directly from HP they are making a killing with high profits margins built in.