I suspect the battery gauge of your N5 need a calibration, so before you go for a battery replacement, maybe you you try to perform a calibration. While Lithium battery installed in N5 does not have memory effect, it does has what we called inaccurate gauge issue, and this problem is quite common when a battery has been idled and/or drained for a long time. If you run into inaccurate battery reading or sudden power off when the duration period didn't add up, I suggest you do a gauge calibration to verify the problem. In fact this is something that we all should be doing occasionally. I normally do this after 15-20 charging cycle (2 times 50% charging is count as one cycle) An inaccurate gauge can lead to the fact that the the battery capacity values are are wrong. The battery may report that it still has reasonable capacity when in fact it has a much lower value, and this causes the computer to shutdown unexpectedly. You can google the terms "Calibrate Gauge" on Lithium Battery.
To calibrate the gauge of a lithium battery, you simply need to do a full discharge followed by a full charge, so this is what I advice:
- Turn on the LED screen to maximum brightness and set the screen to "always on", keep it running until the player turn off itself.
- Charge the battery overnight, till you see 99% or 100% on the meter
You can verify the result by starting to play some song on the N5 continuously with screen off, check the battery reading after 1, 2, 3, 4 hours and so on, if you can get 7-8 hours of playback, the battery is not that bad since the N5 is quite an aged DAP by today standard.
We sell N5 battery, the problem is we can't deliver the battery to you by air, all flight forwarder refused to take uninstalled Lithium battery right now, so the only way to get around that is to send the N5 to us and we perform the battery replacement for you, and then send it back. This is, however fairly expensive when take the mailing cost into account.