VGN-NW270D - Battery down to 1/4 and cant use the Low Cost Chinese version battery - HELP ME PLEASE!

Hi Guys

I bought my Sony Vaio VGN-NW270D from Canada 10 months back, at the time of purchase I was assured that the notebook battery will give me roughly 4 hours of power though it gave me 3 hours, when I contacted the store people then they told me that its something with Windows 7 and soon Microsoft will release some patch which will fix the battery power thing (yep I am stupid to believe that and never requested for the replacement or returned).

Any how now I hardly get an hour after fully charging the battery - thats on low and standard settings (I have already forgotten about the High Performance Settings)

Instead of buying the extended power battery from Sony ($200+) I am thinking to buy the China made battery from EBAY ($40 to $60) though in every Ebay auction (of compatible battery) there is a clear text given that the battery won't work or not suitable for the notebooks that are running on Windows 7 - why the hell is this?

I have friends who have used similar low priced batteries with their HP and Dell etc. (using with XP, Ubuntu and Vista) and quite happy with it so why I cant use that due to Windows 7?

Can anyone please help me in this matter?

 

I just bought one of those chinese batteries last week for my wife's two year old VGN-NR498D.
Basically, the battery comes with a CD that you need to use to update the BIOS on the machine before using the battery in order for it to be recognized. However, the BIOS updater only works under a 32-bit version of Windows.

As I had installed Windows 7 x64, the updater didn't work so I swapped the harddrive and installed Vista x32 via the restore discs and updated the BIOS from there. Once done, I just swapped the drive back and bingo, the battery works fine.

 

Hi Sandstrom83

First of all thanks for the help, secondly there are a few problems
- I do not have a spare hard drive that I can connect or replace with my laptop
- I only have Win 7 Home 64Bit installed in my laptop and the back disks that I made myself so no 32bit format of Vista or Win 7 available to me.
- I am a bit too scared to mess with the hardware side like changing hard drives (dont have any spare either) and recently I burnt the hard drive of my wife's Acer laptop while upgrading it from XP to Win 7 so definitely dont have the guts to even touch the screws of my laptop.

Is there any other way to make the Chinese battery work without the hardware stuff?

I contacted the sellers in ebay and all said that they only sell batteries in jiffy wrap - nobody mentioned any bios or driver CD.

Guys please help me.