I was asked recently if I would look at a Dell laptop that was not recognizing a new battery. The new battery looked well made, fit perfectly in the Dell but was not recognized. I put the old battery in and got a message stating that the battery is at the end of it’s life cycle and buy a new battery. Here comes the gotcha! If you buy a Dell brand battery it is three times as expensive as the off brand. Now I didn’t have a new Dell battery to test but my guess is that the Dell brand battery will be recognized by the Dell laptop. The 3rd party vendor insists the battery will work if you follow their instructions which involve updating the bios, the CMOS, yadda yadda. Dell support simply said it isn’t our battery. Tsk Tsk. Third party people provided a bunch of busy work that did nothing. I also found it interesting that the Dell bios upgrade could not be done with the third party battery installed. I had to put the old battery in before it would update the bios. Interesting...