Buying a Laptop Battery

CheBourgeoisNoir

Hey all - it's gotten to the point where my laptop doesn't even recgonize my battery anymore and I'm running directly off AC power. From Dell's official website, their battery for my E1705 notebook is this:
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Power/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=312-0425&mfgpid=184672#Overview

I'm just wondering if there's any other options to dropping $155 on a battery; I've only had this laptop (and this battery) since October of '06. Do they really die this quickly? Can I go with a generic, and where should I go to find one? Anybody have any experiences with this sort of madness? (Ed Note: The 47 customer reviews offered all consist of stories like mine. Shitty.)

For the record, it's a 80-watt-hour, 9-cell, 11.1V LiON notebook battery

Mai-Kero

Did you have any kind of warranty with your Dell?

CheBourgeoisNoir

Yeah, I have the four-year platinum warranty - I haven't called Dell yet, but I'm under the impression they don't cover batteries since they are "expendable" items. Maybe they'll do a discount or something. The other weird thing is, there's a button on the battery itself you can press to see the charge remaining on the battery, and if you hold it down it shows x dots out of 5, with each dot meaning 20% of total charge lost. I can't get that secondary function to work, it's basically just bricked.

EDIT: http://www.level8technology.com/servlet/the-944/dell-312-0425-battery/Detail?zmam=54821320&zmas=1&zmac=2&zmap=312-0425 = $80 bucks. Anybody ever use level8tech before?