It has been three years since I have bought my Sony Vaio, Long back my battery has gone and I wasn't getting much of battery life (approx 10 mins). So mostly it was always plugged in when working, but because of the battery it was getting heated up too much, and it was never on Lap Top!!
Recently it crashed because of a RAM issue, and I took it to my friend if he could open it up and remove a RAM and check with other RAM, I did not had the right equipment to open it up. I am going to order one from EBAY and hope I would be able to do it next time. It was finally up when the faulty RAM was removed. Now that he also had cleaned the cooling fans the only thing that was causing heating was my old battery. He suggested to order a battery on Ebay from Hong-Kong which you would get at 1/5th of the price you pay when you buy it from Sony. An order was placed. It arrived in about 2-3 weeks time.
Only when I opened up the pack, there was a small CD saying that you may have to update the BIOS to use this intelligent battery. I am not sure how a battery can be intelligent, so I just plugged in the new battery and it wasn't booting the laptop. When I checked it with my friend I came to know that the SONY BIOS reads the serial number of battery from its EEPROM and hence it would not allow non-oem battery to work with a VAIO. Now I understood why they have asked to patch bios for working with INTELLIGENT battery.
But since I had windows 7, 64 bit OS, the software tool they have provided to update bios did not work because of USER access permission error as below.
Phoenix Secure WinFlash "Cannot load driver C:\....phlashnt.sys. This driver has been blocked from loading. Error code:1275.”
Now I had to fall back to windows xp to run this tool to update bios and then install windows 7 back. Now that flash is updated the battery is working fine, and I am getting about 2+ hours of backup. I am happy finally. I just updated this in blog, so that for anyone who bought non-oem battery on ebay, don't assume that your battery is FAKE, but it is intelligent, and you need to patch your bios. Keep in mind that any failure while updating bios would brick your laptop, and it would be rendered useless. Make sure you back up bios before updating and you know the right procedure and tools.
For any help, do leave a comment, I would try to help out.
