Battery backup is low

[saleekhshaz]

I have pavilion e034tx i5 3rd gen notebook.It is 3 years old and my battery back up is only 25min.I have to replace my battery. I have 2 question

1  Should I replace hp original expensive battery or aftermarket cheap battery which claims 3hr backup?

2  Is there any chance to face any other major problems in future like harddisk damage etc.. or Iis it wise to upgrade to brand new notebook. Is it worth investing extra bucks?

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@saleekhshaz

Let met try to answer your questions ...

1)  HP is going to tell you to buy the HP battery, but when I have replaced batteries, I buy generic ones.  I personally don't see the value in spending $80 or more for a battery -- but then, in my case, the laptops are plugged in like 90% of the time.  I even take along car chargers when I travel.  If you use the laptop on battery power a lot, it's probably worth the extra money to get the genuine HP battery.

2) Hard disks fail eventually -- there's no way around that.  My general metric for laptops is 5 years at most on a hard drive.  Plus, I have replaced the HDDs in my laptops with SDDs.  That solves the "moving parts" problem (as in, bumping the laptop while the disk is spinning) and the performance with SDDs is much faster.  If you're going to keep your laptop for a long time, I suggest investing in an SDD.

3) New notebook -- the choice of whether or not the new features are worth the cost is entirely subjective.  I have an old HP DV6 laptop that came with Win7, I've upgraded it to Win10, swapped out the HDD with an SDD -- and see no reason at all to spend the money I did on it on a new laptop.

But, then again, I use my Desktop for 90% of my computing, and if you use a laptop primarily, then the new ones bring a lot of improvements to the table -- so they might be well worth the cost.