Replacing Li-Ion with Li-Po?

[jagec]

Hi,
My battery recently crapped out on me, and so I get to buy some new cells for it and replace them, thus saving me money by costing me time. Yay!

Anyway, I got the battery apart, confirmed that my laptop is using standard 18650 cells, and started researching who's got them for cheap. A couple of questions came to mind.

Firstly, these things are REALLY REALLY cheap on ebay. Yes, I know, I'm buying a crappy Chinese knockoff which won't perform as well as any real brand. But, considering that everything is made in China anyways, do the non-ebay batteries really perform 400% better than the ones on ebay? Any experience with ebay 18650's, or should I just stick to ?

Also, I am toying with the idea of trying Li-Poly cells instead. Normally I would say "this is a terrible idea jagec, you're going to burn your house down", but the thing is that the chemistry is (essentially) identical and all of the protection circuitry is already in the battery pack. This should prevent spontaneous autoelectropyrodarwinism. Any thoughts on that? Or are all modern Li-Ions incorporating polymer technology anyway these days?

 

[mpilchfamily]

Well to be sure the other batteries will work you will need to verfy which method they need for charging and if the laptop supports it. Also you need to make sure that the laptop isn't going to be putting too much or too little power to the battery to charge it.

About the only problem you may have with the eaby batteries is that they are as dead as yours are. No way to know if they are new or not.