If you own a laptop, the day will inevitably come when it stops holding a charge. This is always disappointing, because you then have to decide whether you want to dump the money into a new battery, or simply be content to keep it plugged into the wall all the time. Whichever you decide, you generally won’t be needing that old battery again, but don’t throw it out. What you may not know is that some of the cells may actually still be perfectly good. It’s usually only one or two bad ones that cause the whole thing to not work. If you pull them out and charge them individually, they can be put to good use.

Roy Wood over at GeekDad has put together a small guide on how to use these laptop cells for other applications. One of the first things to mention is that despite their appearance, you do not have six AA batteries hiding in your laptop. These lithium cells are rather different (and aren’t quite the same size). So what do you do with them? Well, once you pick up a charger that will work with them, you can find flashlights that were designed to use these cells. Since the cells provide more power than your standard AA battery, you’ll get a much longer life out of it. You can also use them for powering Arduino projects. Just keep in mind that you’ll need to be a bit more careful with these than regular batteries.