Unused 3yo battery Fix Kit - has it expired?

Hi again @jfsk, here's what I figured out. Unfortunately, because of your batteries age, we can’t vouch for its current quality. We don't advise using old batteries, but there might not be anything wrong with it.

I hope this answers your question!

@amber You would be surprised how well a good battery holds up. I have seen non recalled D620/30 Sony batteries hold a charge, even in 2021. Meanwhile the replacement SMP packs with all of the nannies are hot garbage. Never truly tested the runtime on those, but they work. Even got a D Bay battery from 2007 (came with the floppy) which works - again, have not tested the capacity yet.

A good battery can run 10+ years, albeit heavily worn a lot of the time. 3 years is nothing I would be PERSONALLY worried about.

For a while my HP nc6000 (Pentium M, so IDE throughout) was fine on the HP Sony pack until one of the cells ran hotter than the rest of the pack. The reason why we do not see 10+ year life batteries now is because of all of the controller nannies (thanks, Sony!) today. While a D Series pack doesn't GAF if you let it sit for years (as long as the cells are usable) an E6400 will complain about it, and the custom TI battery gauge Dell has used since the E Series which changes every release (which is why I can't use a 6430 battery in a 6440 GRR) also changes and potentially trip a permanent failure over being .1V too low when it just needs to trickle charge. Sitting still isn't good but if I had to choose between a OEM Sony pack (or a working SMP) vs cheap clones from China on a D630 I will take my chances on a old OEM battery that came with the laptop - every time.

On one hand I realize this is coming from experience vs. inexperience so I know not to play Russian Roulette with the 2005-2009 recall packs from Sony, but it can be done with caution.