I figure that at the very least, I'm getting one more year of use out of my laptop and went ahead with buying a new battery. I opted for the six-cell instead of the 12-cell or the 6/12 combo, which I was able to find on eBay for $38 (which is considerably marked down from the HP price of $149 and the Newegg price of $78). I'm glad I did; the six-cell battery offers just over three hours of battery life, and as of yet I haven't managed to purposely discharge the entire thing. Road trip, maybe?
On Saturday, I accompanied a friend to the North End to pick up a calculator from a Craigslist seller; sadly, he didn't show up, so both of us ended up going to Radio Shack. I noticed that Radio Shack was selling 12-volt camcorder batteries for $14.99 each (reg. $32.99), so I figured I'd buy one. The manager came up to me and offered the price of $10 each if I'd buy out the store's stock, since they had been trying to get rid of these batteries for ages. Needless to say, I now have four more camcorder batteries, for a total of four working batteries, two more that don't perform so well, and one that doesn't work at all.
Does anybody know of anywhere in the Boston area where I can drop off used lead-acid, NiMH, and Lithium Ion batteries? I have a ton of them needing to be recycled.