So Kyan's having an issue where his dell laptop sometimes won't work on battery. It's weird, it registers that the battery is there, and will show it at say 91%, but plugged in it won't charge and if you unplug it it turns straight off. But leave it a while, and it works like normal. Then it doesn't. Then it does. I replaced the battery about 6 months ago; couldn't get one from Dell. So maybe it's the replacement battery, but maybe it isn't. He needs a working one for school and they're not allowed to use the adaptors, so it's a pain for him. Problem is I don't know if it's just the replacement battery, or something else going wrong with his laptop? I'd happily just buy another battery rather than replace the laptop. He does some tech classes so needs an i5 with 8g and decent battery life, which is what this had until the last few days.

Any thoughts or wisdom? Dell weren't much help, but when I was in chat with them the laptop was behaving and tested fine. I haven't been able to find much help from google yet.