Is it worth replacing batteries in older devices? What difference does keeping the internals clean really make? Let’s find out.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, it’s maintenance day, as we replace the batteries, the delicious thermal pasta and generally give a bit of loving to the HP Envy laptop and GPD Win 3 of previous videos.
Now, some might say that this should have been part of those videos, and you’d be right! But the replacement batteries didn’t arrive in time. Curse you, global logistics!
Let’s deal with that laptop first, and I suppose we’d better establish a baseline to see if this was worth doing. Realistic battery life tests are difficult to keep standardised, but as I’m not comparing different laptops that makes it a bit easier.
I’m going to run a one hour YouTube video over WIFI with the screen set at my usual brightness, and the audio silenced for the sake of my sanity until it dies. And you’re going to watch it in real time.
Oh, okay, I’ll spare you, and also my camera’s batteries from the most boring timelapse in the world. It dropped from 100% to 68% over that hour. You’ll just have to trust me.
For a repeatable CPU intensive task, I’m going to let the Prime95 and Furmark stress tests run until it keels over, and it sat there calculating prime numbers and simulating furry doughnuts for 1 hour 45 minutes before taking a nap, from a fully recharged battery.
I’m also going to replace the thermal paste to see if we can’t improve the temperatures. I think the stress test’s going to give us a worst case for this, where it’s levelling out at 67 degrees C while hitting a max of 77°C
Unfortunately official replacement batteries are no longer available and frankly were prohibitively expensive anyway, and the third party market is a crapshoot in terms of quality and price. So let’s go gambling!
I’ve not found any reliable way to get good quality, reasonably priced third party batteries, so all I can advise is find an AliExpress listing with a decent number of sales and a decent rating – so not a solitary five star review. That’s landed me with this replacement from trusted brand DODOMORN. Think battery, think DODOMORN. This content is in no way sponsored by DODOMORN.
The unscrewing and unclipping is hampered mainly by me not realising some screws are hidden under the rubber feet, but with that sorted and with judicious application of plastic pry tools the back pops off.
The battery is held in with four screws, with those removed it unclips and can be unplugged and replaced.
While we’re in here, let’s see if we can’t clean it up and replace the thermal paste. One of the primary criticisms of this laptop from the time was that it ran hot, so it needs all the help it can get. This, it turns out, was long overdue, so removing that crusty old stuff should help. The rest of the fan and heatsink assembly is reasonably clean but of course we’ll brush that off while we are here.
I’m not completely sure if there’s any need to condition the battery in Space Year 2026, but I’ve let this fully charge up for a day and then drained it back down a couple of times just in case.
Running the same one hour YouTube test, the battery now drains only to 81%, so that implies it will get a a full extra hour of video out of a charge. Not to be sniffed at. In the stress test, it’s now lasting 2 hours and 12 minutes – while that’s not even half an hour more, it’s still a 25% increase. However it’s now running a 54 degrees C, a massive 13 degrees less, so a great improvement there.
Was this a worthwhile use of £18 and about an hour? Well, I don’t travel as much I used to so I don’t actually use this away from a wall socket very much, so the benefits of the extra battery life are nice, but not game changing. Still, for £18, churlish to complain about value for money. I don’t regret the decision.
Changing the thermal paste is an absolute no-brainer though, I should have done it long ago and the drop in operating temperature and noise levels is absolutely worth the time invested, and the pennies worth of thermal paste. A welcome reminder that even if you’re not using your devices very much, it’s worth opening them up, cleaning them, and changing the paste every couple of years. If you haven’t done it for your kit, do it now.
Moving on to the GPD Win 3, and you’ll notice that this analogue stick it looking a little droopy. I’d tried to take this stick cover off and seem to have pulled the stick off its mounts completely, because I am the world’s strongest nerd. So let’s try and fix that, as well as change the battery and replace the thermal paste.
The choice of battery suppliers for the GPD Win devices are even more limited, and they all seem to point back to the same item anyway. In the end I ordered from batterybuy.co.uk, which if nothing else is a website that does what it says on the tin. At £44, this is a bit more of a gamble, at least when thought of in terms of the percentage of the total value of the device, which cost me £220 a little over a year ago.
Let’s run through the same test procedure – with the same methodologies, this is currently dropping a massive 45% when viewing one hour of streaming video, and a mere 45 minutes when taxing the processor with the Furmark/Prime 95 torture test, where it’s sitting at a temperature of 61°C.
I won’t lie, I’m a little trepidatious about ripping this apart. After changing the battery on the original GPD Win it never went back together quite as tight as factory, but needs must.
Thankfully we’re not going anywhere near the sliding screen mechanisms. The back comes off reasonably easily, after being unscrewed and pryed apart with plastic picks.
What’s happened with the joystick is that this mounting tab has snapped off. It’s too small to repair, in my estimation. It’s not the end of the world as this top part of the housing is also friction fit against the trigger buttons assembly, so relocating the lower pin should hold this acceptably if I’m not too rough with it. If that doesn’t hold long term I’ll order up a replacement part.
The fan, heatsink and the CPU heatspreader are slightly interlocked but unscrew and remove easily enough, just need to keep track of the one longer screw on heatspreader that also has to go through the heatsink plate.
Clearly this needed a clean long before now. Call in the gooch collector.
The old battery is glued in pretty well, but responds to the application of naked force after working a bit of pure alcohol in to loosen it a little. There’s enough residual stickiness that I’m not going to apply fresh adhesive, conduct your own risk assessment should you attempt this.
I’ve given this the same conditioning treatment, and after re-running the tests it’s only dropping 10% after an hour of youtube video, and the torture test now lasts 1 hour 38 minutes, more than twice as long.
The temperature during the stress test drops to 52 to 54 deg C, so say roughly eight degrees cooler, and it’s much quieter too so a good quality of life improvement.
Given the size of screen, this is never the primary choice for watching video but the going from two and a bit hours to ten is a suspicious improvement, I expect there was some background process going that I didn’t notice when testing the old battery.
While it’s also not a huge increase in stress test running time, it’s more worthwhile on this device than the laptop. 45 minutes was only just enough time to start getting into a groove on the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3, so the extra 53 minutes is very much appreciated. An hour and a half is a much better length of time for a gaming session, so that’s a win.
Again, cleaning it out and repasting was very much an exercise worth doing. While it wasn’t thermal throttling before even through that wall of fur blocking the heatsink, clearing it out certainly means the fan’s not working so hard, or so loudly.
So that’s the conclusion of this video – changing a still halfway decently performing battery might not be transformative, so unless it’s cramping your style maybe hold off on that until your battery is completely goosed. Changing the thermal paste and cleaning it out, however, is a very low cost and high impact bit of maintenance that should not be neglected.
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