Noticed my five year old laptop has started sitting slightly unevenly on the desk over the past couple of weeks, took the bottom panel off out of curiosity and found the battery has visibly swollen just enough to push against the casing from the inside, nothing dramatic looking but definitely not flat and normal shaped the way it used to be. Battery life itself has also been getting noticeably worse over the past few months, though I had mostly attributed that to just general age rather than considering it might be an actual swelling issue building up underneath.
Read a few things online suggesting a swollen laptop battery can potentially be a genuine fire risk if left unaddressed for too long, though I am honestly not sure how urgent that risk actually is in practice versus just being a worst case scenario that gets repeated a lot online without much context about how likely it actually is day to day.
The laptop still works fine otherwise for basic browsing and documents, which is mostly all I actually use it for at this point, so part of me is tempted to just keep using it carefully rather than spending money on a battery replacement or a whole new laptop for something that still functions adequately for my actual needs.
Checked with a local repair shop about battery replacement cost specifically, quote came back reasonable enough that it might genuinely be worth just doing that instead of continuing to use a swollen battery and hoping nothing goes wrong, though I have not committed to actually booking it in yet.
Has anyone else dealt with an old laptop battery swelling like this, and did you end up replacing just the battery or was it more of a sign to move on to a new machine entirely? Curious how urgent this actually is in practice rather than just going by worst case warnings online.