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IBM 600 Series Laptops and Flaky Batteries?
netdemonboberb asks:
"I don't know where else we should turn, because no site will write articles on [this subject] and IBM is denying that their IBM 600 series laptops have flaky batteries. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute distributed these laptops to freshman students in 1999 and almost everyone I knew in my class had this issue. Ralph Levien's page has suggested it appears to be an issue with the 'Smart Monitoring' circuitry.
I'm writing this article to get the issue out in the open so IBM can no longer deny it. These batteries are expensive, and I have had to replace mine 4 times already. Can anyone who reads/maintains slashdot help or provide any advice on getting resolution for this?" I must say that from personal experience, I've wondered if this might be the case as well. I have an IBM Thinkpad 600e laptop and I've already gone through 2 batteries. The laptop is currently inactive as it must be tied to the wall if it is to be used. Has anyone else experienced shorter-than-average battery life using these laptops? Were you able to do anything to improve the battery life?
I have an old Fujitsu from 1996 that still holds a good charge, but I also have an IBM thinkpad that someone gave me, I'm guessing it's about a 1998 or 1999 model and the battery is stone dead.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
I've got a 560 and used it mainly connected to the mains. My battery died very fast as it seems the TP would keep the battery topped up even if you was using mains power. Upgrading to the latest BIOS fixed the problem but I still had to shell out for a new battery (as mentioned, not cheap).
These laptops are 3-4 years old. Laptop batteries last 1-2 years under moderate use, less if you recharge more often (Heavily used ones last under 6 months sometimes).
Where's the problem?
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
If this is as widespread as it would appear, it's just a matter of time before someone works up the nerve to file a class action lawsuit. If I were you (and IANAL), i'd keep any paperwork IBM has sent you disputing your claim of a faulty product. It may help you to settle the matter if it ever does go to court.
today is spelling optional day.
Many battery manufacturers design generic cells and current regulators and package them in carriers that are specified by the PC manufacturer. In this case the current regulators are to blame as they have difficulty dealing with minor variations in current required by the laptop's power supply. In particular, systems with less than robust power management, Linux for instance, literally suck the regulators to death.
I would suggest contacting the Better Business Bureau to get these complaints addressed.
Could it be that certain "lots" of batteries or laptops were bad? We have upgraded most of these to the T23 model, so I don't have one handy to check manufacture dates. Perhaps someone else who has had little or no problems can give you some dates.
-----
Am I the only one who thinks Tux is as creepy as the clown on Poltergeist?
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
I've also had this problem. I use an IBM Thinkpad 600 at work and the battery dies on me when I undock. It says it's just fine, but within minutes warns me that the battery is about to die, very similar to the report in the linked article.
It starts out fine with a new battery and gets progressively worse. I asked our helpdesk about it, and the helpdesk representative said that this sytem occasionally needs to be unplugged and the battery allows to run down, indicating this is a memory effect of some kind. His advice was once every 2 weeks, and he indicated that IBM suggested this to him. I'm a consultant but we have contracts both with external clients, and with clients who are sister companies. It is not uncommon therefore for me to not need to undock my laptop for months at a time.
I've gone through 2 batteries in a year. The batteries last about a month, after which I start dragging my power adapter around with me while the paperwork gets filled out for a new battery. This one died about 6 months ago, but my laptop is (and has been) scheduled for replacement since then so I haven't bothered to get it replaced.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
It seems odd that so many people would be experiencing the same problems with batteries in a specific model of laptop. Perhaps there was an accident at the factory?
I think you should contact IBM with your serial number. I'll bet they'll sort it out. Most likely you wouldn't be the first person to complain, and I doubt they'd charge you to fix it. If all else fails, look into getting a Mac. Their batteries are known to last for figuritively ever.
A flaky laptop battery, now that is a powerful weapon. We could save my city, and all the cities of the land.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
The battery on my ThinkPad 755CD only lasts an hour at best (much less if I'm trying to play a game or a music CD). I bought it used from an auction site, though, so I don't know if the battery was this short-lived when the machine was new.
I've had a variety of IBM thinkpads...so its hard to keep track. I did have a 600e and if i used the battery, I always let it run completely out on the battery before plugging it back in...and I never had any problems with it. I've carried that practice on from the early days of laptop computing...where batteries had a memory of sorts that if oyu kept recharging them when they were halfway full you'd end up with the 50% of the battery being the active aprt, and the other 50% would be forgotten about, and un rechargable. I'm not sure if that is still the case in the newer thinkpads like the 600e though. Just an old habit. Anyone an expert on battery types?
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
At one point, my previous employeer had ~150+ IMB ThinkPad 600 series laptops operational in the office where I worked as a SysAdmin. Almost all of them eventually developed battery problems (short life and rapid reduction in its ability to hold a charge). While we operated, we kept a constant supply of replacement batteries on hand. After the .com bubble burst and the laptops were sold off, I'd guess that about 75% or more left with dead or dying batteries.
I have been supported by IBM during college (German BA Studium) and all students in my course got 600Es.
After three years almost everyone got a replacement battery. Mine (and most others) runs about 10 to 15 minutes...
In spite of advances in battery technology, it is my impression that batteries are getting worse! I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 that has had the exact same problem and, fo course, Dell just want to sell you another battery. I have an older Dell 7500, and its battery is till going strong despite being three times as old.
I had a thinkpad 600e model 2645-EU
The interesting thing is that it a 3 year warranty on the whole, but the battery itself had only 1 year. When the battery failed on me the first year i had the laptop, I called IBM support and they said "yeah we had a problem with one run of the batteries and it's fixed now", I got an RMA'd one, it worked for 2 years, and now it's dead too. We even tried here at work to 'fool' IBM by trying to RMA a whole laptop -- they sent us a refurbished 600e... sans the battery, with the instructions "use your old batter"
Thinpad 600x, at least 4 years old, main battery is A-OK and even the Ultrabay battery is going fine. We had a few dozen on these things at work. Some batteries had to be replaced after a year or two, but most are still going on the original battery.
Thinkpad 770 batteries, that's another story. Of course, that thing was almost a desktop with a TFT built into it, but still, it had battery problems.
Personally, I'm loving my new T30.
So, in short, no, you're just imagining it.
...inconsistent is better than incendiary.
Not an IBM, but apple's ibooks have the same problem. The dropoff point on the battery goes up and up and up (for fun I held onto my last one until you unplugged it, the battery discharged to 97% before going dead). I was wondering if it was a charging problem or if there is a common li-ion battery manufacturer who is at fault...maybe a common manufacterer makes the same battery charging components for IBM and Apple, though?
You can have a look here for some reports of the dead batteries (though most of the people there are blaming it on jaguar, I run linux on my ibook and have had the problem twice).
So stick it to apple while you're at it, eh? Of course if you're smart, buy the extended warranty. It will cost apple a lot more money to give you an extra battery every 3 months for 3 years than it will to fix/replace your ibook probably. Might as well teach them a lesson...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
This is why I made the switch from Apple to PC. When there were glitches with my Powerbook that other people had too, there was no "other Powerbook" to choose instead. You were stuck with whatever quality problems Apple had with their manufacturing or design. And I hear now that the new powerbooks have some of the same old problems my powerbook did. Their engineers probably just told Steve that the customers are stupid and don't know what they are talking about (Or is that what Steve told the engineers?).
I have deployed and supported both Thinkpad 600 and 600X configurations, and Dell Latitude 366 and 300 MHZ models, and they all seem to have batteries that last just over a year.
Literally, to the point that we will get a sudden surge.. six or so a week, of stone dead batteries. A little digging on my part led me to believe that the six came in together as well, and they usually died a little bit over a year after purchase. (Note, this is a "little bit" after the warranty.. batteries are warranted for one year from date of purchase of the LAPTOP not the battery, at least here.)
Now, the IBM's have a charging circuit that keeps the battery "conditioned". Would this kill a battery in a year? Probably. WHat I know a lot of people do is ONLY put the battery in if they are going to use it off AC. Charge it for an hour before you need it, and run it down. When you get back to your desk, pop the battery out, and dock without the battery.. that seems to be the "rage" as rumored by our customers who have traveled to Japan, where they claim people do this.
YMMV, but as a tech who supports about 1K of these things, yeah.. the batteries die in a year, and yeah, the IBM party line is "this is normal".
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
I have a vaio SR11k. The battery is slowly degrading (down to 120 minutes from initial 150 minutes a year ago), but the interesting thing is that at the beginning the charge reported by the BIOS (APM) was almost linear, now I get the last 60 (!) minutes of operation in the last 4% of detected battery charge.
My solution to this is ext3 (I mostly run Linux on it) and just running it until it goes down by itself. If the IBMs have similar behaviour, but force a power-off at, say, 10% detected charge, an equivalent battery would be good for only about 30 minutes instead of the 2 hours I get.
Side note: I am not using the laptop that often, maybe 2 times per week on battery.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
Same here... I rarely (a few minutes per month)
use my battery and I've gone through two.
(My 560 did not not have this problem, sure the
battery life diminished but the 600 has burned
through two batteries)
Friends are having the same problem.
i've been sticking with thinkpads.
the cdrom failed long ago.
I'd like to get a new thinkpad but since IBM
can't even get it together to get USB 2.0
(or firewire) I'm looking elsewhere.
Maybe I'll go back to Mac... is't been 19 years
since I bought a Mac.
We had a bunch of 600 and 600e's at work, and one by one the batteries died. We had a 3 year warrantee deal, and it was ok for about 2-2.5 years. Then, they stop honoring dead batteries! I don't know if our tech help didn't protest or tell the right people in our company, but I was told "IBM won't honor the warrantee, your group or you personally will have to buy a new battery". Just out and out said, too bad. WTF! Since I was the last one to have such an old laptop, no one really cared to raise a stink about it.
We generally get good service from IBM, but the techs said that IBM was blowing off these batteries because they all started dying after 1.5-2.5 years, and they figured they ALL were going to go bad.
This sounds like the car manufacturer beancounter stories- how much to fix all the problems vs. how much in potential lawsuits. And how many people are going to press a lawsuit for a $100-$200 battery?
The worst part is the battery is dead, the hard drive is physically failing, it's slow as molasses, but since it still works I can't get an upgrade! How many seconds in a microwave....?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I've had similar problems with my thinkpad 390e. It only works plugged into the wall now. I gave up on replacement batteries and bought a PowerBook. I haven't regretted that one bit.
I entered RPI a year later and got a T20 notebook and have had the same problems. While I haven't had to replace the battery, it only works long enough to boot Windows and go into sleep mode. Most of my friends also have this problem, and we all took care in properly charging the batteries. Seems like it's an Thinkpad problem, not just a 600 problem.
I've had 2 TP 600's (a PII-266 TP 600, and a PII-366 600e), both used. The 600 came with a battery that it seemed wouldn't die, and the 600e came with a dead battery.
:
It seems this is not an unusual situation, if you spend a little time looking around on eBay. Here's how to avoid trouble
1. Do a search for 'dead Thinkpad 600 battery', and note the FRU#'s.
2. Do not buy a replacement battery that matches one of those numbers. It's just a matter of time. If it's not dead already, it will be.
I don't know the FRU# on it (process of elimination following step 1 above will tell you which ones are ok), but it's my recollection that they fixed this problem. You just have to find the right battery.
Need a simple, easy to use data tier generator? http://www.gryphinsoftware.com/
As an RC car racer, I deal with battery 'conditioning'. The only batteries you have to do this with is the Ni-Cad ones. The NiMh ones do not require this procedure. I do not know about Li-ion batteries though.
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
Not so :). See my previous post about apple's batteries. We have the same problems...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Ack! NO!!!! Not for lithium cells!
If you actually managed to fully drain a lithium battery, you would run the risk of polarity reversal. That is BAD! Part of the reason lithium battery packs have a microchip is to shut them off before they fully discharge. The chip also regulates the charge cycle so they don't grenade from overcharging.
NiCD batteries develop a charge memory and must be conditioned. NiMH batteries do to but to a much lesser extent. Lead acid batteries are the exact opposite, keep 'em charged up at all times.
Just remember, who's lap it's on top of.
I have a Thinkpad 560 which refuses to charge the battery. After buying a second battery and realizing that it was not a bad battery, I came to the conclusion that it was the L-shaped power management board inside.
At a computer show, I came aross a $20 trashed TP560, which I bought and used for extra parts - replacing the power board on my working 560. All went well for about a month - then that board blew as well!
So, I'm assuming that it may be the AC adapter or the motherboard that is frying the power circuitry on the 560's.
Aside from that, when opening up the chassis, I discovered that that IRDA transceiver was located to the left of the board (behind the power switch). The IR window, however, is located at the front of the unit no where near the transceiver. That is a pretty odd design flaw.
Yet another example of the old 'Tute Screw! (all -1,Offtopic mods indicate that you didn't go to RPI)
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Apparently the battery issue is caused by over charging and top-up charging. I'm told you can avoid the problem by charging the battery while the laptop is switched off - and once the charging light turns from amber to green, disconnect the power and run the laptop from the battery or remove the battery and run the laptop from mains. You don't have to worry so much about proper charge cycles with these batteries, just give it a complete cycle once a week or so (for a heavily used machine).
:)
It mightt be possible to recondition a dodgy battery by discharging/charging it fully - the problem is, the laptop won't run at all on a battery which reports itself empty, so you can't discharge it that way. I had an idea to make a little device which will draw a steady current from the battery until it's really empty - not being much of an electronics geek, I'm rather worried about causing a fire
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
In my experience, most batteries (except for some, but not all, lead acid gel batteries) die pretty quickly. They never last more than about 2 years, at best. (Although it sounds like the author is complaining about something even worse). I can no longer recall just how many cordless phones I've bought...
Neither NiMH or LiION have a sigificant memory effect. This means cycling them is not necessary, as it was with NiCd technologies.
A google search for "memory effect LiION" will give you lots of hits to confirm this.
This happened to my 600-Something too.
More information can be found here, it even explains how to get some more life out of your battery.
The company I work for has four TP600e's, and I believe all of them have had their batteries replaced at least once. The battery life on these babies are worse than other IBM models we've had so far (most recently A21m's), and we have indeed considered this to be a bit odd.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
It would not surprise me in the least if there was only one manufacturer of Li-Ion laptop batteries around. It's the same deal for car batteries. Underneath that Die Hard and Runny-Runny-LongTime battery, is the same battery from one (possibly two) companies who manufactures lead acid batteries in the US.
Like most major components which are "hard" to make , most things are merely relabeled products from one company. Ever notice how Castrol doesn't have a refinery, or that Listerine advertises that it is never a generic brand?
Slashdot proclaims itself as a good site for people to get their views out. How the heck does the moderation system make sure that everyone's views are represented appropriately? Lets put it this way, the Slashdot moderation system is flawed for this reason. There is nothing stopping someone from demoding someone just because that person doesn't agree with his or her views. Add the fact, the moderators as a whole have the same powers 24/7 that 400 Slashdot members have 5 times for a period of 5 days at any given time.
I don't hear you suggesting a better alternative
Aw crap, ninjas!
Is to make sure to be extra abusive to your
batteries so they die well in advance of the
seemingly standard 1 year warrantee. That way
you get a fresh battery before the warrantee
wears out.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
While I can't exactly endorse steps 1 and 2, I can comment on my Powerbook G3's battery. I've had it now for two years and I bought it used. It uses the same battery. It alternatives between heavy battery usage and AC time as I will occassionally do things like unplug and sit on the couch to program, and then there's the travelling thing.
It started out by providing me ~3 to ~3 1/2 hours battery time while running Linux, and currently will give me ~2 1/2 to ~2 if I'm being abusive (power wise) after two years of moderate use.
It definitely sounds like there is a problem with your battery (batteries?) if you are not using it on battery time heavily/exclusively. If you ARE pushing it pretty hard, you'll definitely need to do a charge/flush/charge cycle on it as that sounds like battery memory problem.
OK, I just checked some stats on my batteries for fun...
Between the two of them I have a design capacity of 38.88 + 34.56 Wh. In reality I have a functional full-charge capacity of 20.06 + 23.06 Wh respectively. I unplugged the power and I'm down to 19.54Wh + 22.06Wh in one minute.
The discharge cycle counts are 144/329 respectively.
Generally, it's about 2 hours of real use I get out of them, The calculated time is 4:14, but it's going to turn out a lot less than that.
I don't know if this means I have a normal set of batteries or not, but I'm not as impressed with them as I used to be. I had hoped that Li-Ion was better than the Ni-Cd of yester year.
At this rate, I can hardly code my way across the country. Originally I was able to run >7 hours of use.
One thing to keep in mind is the old IT/Support saying:
"He/She who screams loudest, wins."
If your laptop is/is not under warranty, ask for a different series laptop or get your money back outright.
When talking to a given support tech, keep the following in mind:
- Call Tech Support and Present Problem/Issue to IBM Rep on phone in a business tone.
- If the person who you are talking to can't or won't help you, then ask to talk to the person's supervisor.
- Keep repeating the above steps until the problem is solved. Do not take 'No' or 'Sorry, there's nothing I can do for you' as an answer.
- If you keep getting 'No's' from IBM, use the following phrase:
"I'm sorry, that is an answer I cannot accept. Please offer me a different solution."
One thing to keep in mind about IBM is that one division of IBM has no idea what the other is doing. You may have some problems with people not knowing who to contact or to connect you to or be able to offer a solution for you.
Dolemite
_____________________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Same story here. I have 2 different batteries that last about 30-40 minutes each. This is with Mandrake 9.0 running WindowMaker.
Brand new battery in my co-workers machine (reason I have 2 crappy used batteries) lasts less than 2 hours running win98.
The machine is great, save the batteries.
*sigh*
Disclaimer: I am a longtime Mac user as well.
Ok. So the guy has a problem with ONE brand of PC laptops. With PC's you have a choice of over a dozen vendors and the best recommendation you can come up with is to buy a Mac? A computer that uses a completely different operating system and would require not only re-training but a reinvestment in new software for this new OS? Why didn't you recommend a HP, Dell, Gateway,Sony, Micron or even a whitebox laptop?
THINK people THINK. There's nothing wrong with Macs. I love them. But they aren't for everyone.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
My wife's ibook is an original blue one. She still gets 3+ hours out of the battery. Enough for her to work on a plane from west to east coast without a charge.
-Joe
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Seriously guy, I'm not trying to knock IBM, they make good products, but from my experience, Apple makes the longest lasting batteries in laptops, somehting like 4 hours between charges. I know this doesn't solve your immediate problems, but it will possibly solve your long term problem, depending on which software you rely on for your daily tasks.
Try this. if you have one of these laptops that seems to have a short battery life (You'll notice, battery meters will say you have 100%, 95%, 90%, 85%, 80%, 75%, then suddenly 5%.) run until the battery is "dead". Then use tape to cover the two MIDDLE battery terminals these are the terminals that report the charge level back to the laptop. (there are 4 altogether). Put the battery back in and the laptop will start right up, I get another 30-40 minutes. Any battery monitors will report that you don't have a battery installed so you won't know how much time you have left, AND DO NOT CHARGE YOUR LAPTOP WITH THESE TERMINALS COVERED. The laptop will not detect when the battery is full and you can overcharge the battery permanently damaging it (not that it isn't screwed up already)
Insert pithy comment here.
The power switch is also an IR window but I have to admit I was fooled by the indentation on the front.
I purchased a 600e about 8 months ago. What happens is the battery level meter creeps down normally from 100%, then suddenly jumps down to 5% when it reaches a certain level. When I first bought it (used, 8 months ago), it would make it to about 30%, now it barely makes it to 80%. I've heard that if you always leave it uncharged and unplugged when it's not in use, the effect can be minimized. This is a major pain in the ass, but so far, it's worked on my new battery, which drains smoothly all the way down. I leave the old battery in unless I know I'll need to run off battery for a while.
A friend of mine has one in even worse shape. He got a new battery with his, and left the unit plugged in for a month straight. When he finally tried running it off battery again, it would barely last 15 minutes.
I have one of the 600x series, and i just had the battery replaced in mine (it died completely). It happened FAST too. The performance was never stellar (I got an hour tops out of the thing), but after awhile, I noticed it slowly going down.. 45 minutes.. 40... 35... finally it just failed to recharge. This was within the space of a few months.
As for why, I have no idea. I generally kept the laptop plugged in, and only used the battery as a last resort. I got it replaced under the warranty, and the current one lasts a little over two hours, but I'm wondering how quickly that will diminish.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
i was among the class that was FORCED by RPI to buy the IBM 600e when i started there in 99. I wasn't too thrilled at the idea that i HAD to purchase THAT machine -- and the waiting list was horrid (RPI didn't order enough laptops to cover HALF of the students REQUIRED to have one) -- but once i got it, i must say, i have no real complaints. My battery DID die, after about 2.5 years. Actually, it died in quite an interesting way. the laptop WILL NOT BOOT if the battery is inserted. CMOS errors, claiming a bad motherboard. the trackpoint died shortly thereafter too -- but overall, it's a very solid machine. 3.5 years later, and i'm still using it as my primary computer (i'm posting from it right now) -- a tad slow, but it's definitely in it for the long haul. it would be nice if the battery and trackpoint still worked -- but given the CONSTANT USE that it's gotten over the past 3.5 years, i must say, i'm quite impressed with it. :-P
\\vectorhead\\
How about the "Acer Travelmate 312T" (310 Series). I had one die on me with power issues (wouldn't always turned on, would turn itself off, even with powersaving off). If I left it for a long time, it might come back to life for a day or two before problems resumed
I retired my Acer until I saw one on ebay that had a cracked LCD. I bought the new one and transplanted the LCD... it worked awhile and then started experiencing the same power issues.
Not 100% related, but along the same lines. Anyone else know of this or other laptop "cover-ups". For such expensive hardware, the warrantees and defects can sure suck.
Had to replace battery after 1.5 years. (after the warranty expired, of course) Before I never removed the battery from the case, now I remove the battery when it's running off AC. Hoping for a longer battery live this way. (Fingers crossed)
Thinkpad 390+
1st battery unusable after 1 year, no stats available
2nd battery 10.8V, 4.8Ah, hasn't been able to power a system for more than 5 minutes in the past 2 years.
1 year is *not* acceptable battery life. We have a 98 G3 ibook which still gets about 2 hours of MP3 playback, and a Dell ultralight (don't know the model, it isn't here right now) about 2 years old which still gets about 3 hours of use.
Are they following the Gillette model?
The ______ Agenda
I have three batteries with matching 'good' FRU's and one battery with a supposed 'bad' FRU. They're all hosed. The age of the battery and the treatment it's received would seem to be more important.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
Even if the machine carries a three year warranty, batteries usually only have 1 year. If they were still replacing them for you 2 to 2.5 years out.. you're lucky.
Buy the President
Both of these have a battery life under RH 7.2 of about 1.5 hours, which is about the same as they ever had. Both have been used constantly for years. The Fujitsu, in fact, has a flaky power plug, so it is frequently switching between AC and Battery power, yet it has no battery life issues.
My point being, it is not all IBMs, all laptops, or even normal. If you're having an issue, report it to the company. If the company won't help, report it to the BBB.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
I too have a 600 (for real use its 90% of the speed of a new laptop, better supported and so on...). Batteries seem to be a little better than the sony ones (SR1K battery is so bad I think its the last Sony product anyone who bought one will buy 8)). One thing that I found and while obvious might be worth saying. Keep your junk dead battery, use that when you are running off the mains for long periods of time.
So far my best laptop for batteries has been the IBM PC110. The batteries lasted about four years a set and they are a standard (cheap!) camcorder battery part.
Yep.. the batteries will not last if you use the machine plugged in most of the time. If you are using the machine plugged in and are not charging the battery then remove the battery. This is the only way to make the battery last.
Zoid.com
I had a 775 battery pack sitting around, smaller cells:
1. get exacto knife and cut main case open
2. cut foil strips and remove old batteries
3. solder wires to new batteries
4. solder new batteries into correect positions and polarities with the newly attached wires
5. make sure you got them all in right and no shorts or possible shorts. cover them all!
6. tape case closed 'cause you'll be doing this again 6 months later.
7. it works! holds charge for 45 minutes with that battery and most importantly allows you to suspend for weeks!
use this info at your own risk : it worked for me for 4 months now, but who knows if you are as smart as me, you might mess things up and hurt yourself!
They probably don't make batteries any more than IBM does.. but Apple laptops may be more power efficient, not having those x86 space heaters.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I get about 20 minutes out of the battery on my IBM N40 (tadpole box similar to sparcbook but with a PPC instead). The bad part is the batteries are no longer available. Even when new they only got 45 mins at best to a full charge.
i got one as a hand me down. battery lasts about 15 minutes. the battery gauge drains sort of normal for the first 12% or so (albeit on the fast side) but then it will plummet to 5%. i was told that the battery was replaced 3 times already during the warranty period and it would basically get to the point where it's unusable in about 4 months.
My Sony Vaio PCG-F250 has a similar problem. The battery can charge forever (the LED always shows "charging") and the system dies as soon as its plug is pulled.
I'm also starting to see my iBook battery degrade, but at least the iBook battery is a third of the price of the Sony battery...
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
I have a Sony laptop that uses the BP-7 battery, and its smart circuitry seems to have developed a bit of a problem as well. The battery charges, and according to PowerPanel has a 98% capacity charge. Within five minutes of use it has dropped to 10% and triggers an emergency suspend.
Is two years use unreasonable for a battery that retails at over $200?
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
and the answer is I doubt it. You're talking about a laptop from 1999 here, that is now 2-3 years ago, and they got their money, so I doubt they will give a shit. It's sad of course but look at their hard drives.
It's Raph, not Ralph. :)
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
My company has 35 Thinkpad 600s. These laptops have been great, and they have not had any unusual battery problems.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
Working in tech support, I see a lot of dead batteries. But when someone says 'my battery is dead' and you know you gave them a new battery less than 3 months ago, there is definately something wrong.
This situation has happened so often that we have been trying to get batteries under our service contract. People just say batteries are consumable and aren't covered, but when the warrenty is extremley short, and a very high percentage of the batteries that we get fail within a year, what do we do? It's too expensive to keep buying new ones!
I've had a 380XD for a few years now (bought it brand new), and every 6 to 12 months I have had to get a new battery, either IBM or OEM replacements. The laptop only gets used maybe once or twice a week, as it is a network testing machine, and I make sure to let the battery run down to about 10% before I charge it back up. There is definately somthing wrong with IBMs battery management system in their laptops. Additionally, a friend of mine has a newer ThinkPad (not sure which series, but it was purchased in fall of 2000) that suffers the same battery issues.
-===- "Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserver neither" -===-
This is a surprise for me, i have an old 600E and the original battey still works 2 hour or more when is at the top. My real problem isnt the battery, is that 600E doesnt seems to like linux very much... How many days and nights should i spend until the damn modem works?!
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
A portable battery pack, capable of plugging into your AC/DC adaptor slot. While some of these can be a bit bulky, there are others that will fit into the laptop bag well enough. They're nice when your laptop's battery is dying off, and you want longer lasting power. Some of them come with decent warantees so that you can expect a long lifetime as well.
I got a TP600e off eBay last January. I had read on the 'Net that if you leave the machine plugged in all the time, the battery goes bad very quickly, so for the first several months, I was conscientious about running off battery until it was almost discharged at least once a day. Battery life remained at about two hours per charge until, at some point, I stopped being careful and ran it off wall power all the time. Within three weeks, battery life had deteriorated to ten minutes. My advice is simply to keep cycling the battery while it is new to prevent it from deteriorating.
Have a look at Panasonic's LiION webpage. This is consistent with the other battery blurbs I have seen. LiION batteries have a cycle count of ">500", which means that someone who charges their laptop every day will have a dead battery fairly soon. This is the cost of not having to lug around NiMH batteries, which weigh about the double for the same capacity. NiMH would have lasted about twice as long, but then nobody would have bought the laptop because it was too heavy.
Dell's Inspiron batteries are only rated for 400 cycles (ctrl-f for "battery life") of charge/discharge.
That's not long at all, especially if you consider the transit commuter, using his laptop on the ride to and from the office - that's only 200 working days.
I just wish I knew where the "1.5/3 hours" figure comes from though. Even brand new, I was lucky to get 45 minutes, and that's minimal hard drive activity... although I suppose Linux could just be sucking more power (more threads in the background or something) than Windows does.
I have about 10 of those 600's floating around (3-4 years old). Statistically the battery lives are normal. There was one that had the battery dead in about one year. On the other end, several days ago I was working on another one that was up for about 2.5 hours on battery before complaining. The battery was changed only on 2 of them, but some of the original batteries are in pretty poor shape.
It doesn't seem to be any behaviour pattern consistent with the model number (600, 600X) or with the operating system (most of them are Linux only, several are dual boot).
However I agree that IBM should be more selective with the quality of the battery they install in their laptops. Even if the overall quality of their laptops is by far the best, crappy batteries and lack of built-in modems (no, that cannot be called modem) may be a serious concern.
Dont fool yourself, /. is about news, comunity, geeks, flames, and silly questions noone really cares in the real world. eh?, remember that section?, Ask Slashdot?, maybe its.... to ask things to other geeks?
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
Notice the processor stats on the systems are about the same, which means they were put out at about the same time. Now, given that most mfrs use the same few OEMs for specific parts.... maybe the batteries are mfr'd by the same company? If so, maybe there was something wrong with the battery hardware.
Buy the President
I had a work-issued 600x for a year. By the end of the year the battery lasted well under an hour of moderate use (infrequent disk access with time to spin down, very little heavy CPU usage).
I have an A30 now, and I'm at roughly the one-year mark. Despite driving an enormous LCD screen, the battery still manages to last nearly two hours under *heavy* use (DVD playback and gaming on an airplane.)
So yes, I'd say my 600x had a clearly subpar battery.
I have had a Thinkpad 600 for approximately 4 years, with 2 batteries. Each battery was useful for about six months, after which point the charge was only good for 30 minutes off AC. I pretty much stopped using the batteries for anything besides transporting the Thinkpad between locations. The IBM web site does not try to deny the problem with these batteries. It is a design feature, not a defect, so please, let's all just keep giving them 100 dollars a year to use our old Thinkpad.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
...and BOTH have had serious battery life problems, batteries go dead, and battery flakiness. IBM admitted it was their fault and replaced a battery for my ThinkPad 600. I still haven't sent in the ThinkPad 600x because I wasn't sure if this was the batteries themselves or the laptop.
It's a shame, because these are otherwise the best laptops I've ever owned.
Catherine
I have had my 600e for 3yrs now an am on my 4th battery. I find they last the longest when you don't leave the tp pluged in for extended periods of time. If I'm not traveling alot and my tp just sits on my desk pluged in after about 4-6 months the batt is shot. If I actually unplug it and take my tp home at night from a client that bat lasts about a year before I start running into issues. Anyway I always have 2 on hand, one being a good one and the other somewhere in between. Anyway I just ordered my 5th one today as well as a new cdrom drive as it seems to have just given out.
I have the same problem everyone else does, but I have an ultra bay battery that i hoarde so if i need to unplug my computer i use that battery, otherwise, it stays half charged in my desk drawer.
;)
as for people who say the batteries are horribly expensive, in excess of 300 dollars, what are you doing, buying an M$ made battery? you can easily find them new from stores for liess than 150 and dare i say it, you can even find new ones for 85 bucks on ebay (not auction, but ebay sale style) and less if you get a used one (though that would perpetuate the problem
any way I have given my rant
and of course, I still think the main batteries suck, and there is some kind of deeper issue here
Ha! The BBB is completely useless. This is what they do:
u ying_Guides-Best_Dealer_Options_If_You_re_Buying-A _Nissan
1) collect money from businesses
2) make plaques for businesses
3) purge files of complaints
I filed a report on a car dealer. The BBB closed the report. Yes, that's it. No attempt to contact me, didn't even forward my complaint to the dealer. Nothing at all. Just "closed, thanks for writing."
Eventually I involved Nissan national and threatened to sue, and that got my complaint resolved. I also wrote some great Epinoins about it: http://www.epinions.com/auto-topic-Autos-Nissan-B
The BBB is nothing more than a speed bump to discourage consumers from complaining.
Batteries may seem to be getting weaker, but the fact is that battery tech can't nearly compete with the break-neck pace of the electronics they power. Laptops today are so incredibly power hungry due to the ever increasing number of systems that each one has to support (now P4s and Athlons with seperate actual video cards; huge hard drives, huge screens, and our biggest power guzzling friend the WiFi card) that batteries loose it quite quickly. I've got a compaq armada 7700 from either 98 or 99 at 266 mhz. This thing will run for two or three hours on battery (I bought it off of auction, too; go figure) and stay on stand-by for literally days. Then again, it's got a 12 inch screen, is almost three inches thick and weighs about 29 pounds. But hey, I'm willing to sacrifice size, looks, and everything else for longevity. But if you want the latest, then power hungry ye be; better bring your adapter.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
I've had the same problem at our university with the ThinkPad A22m model. We've replaced over 40% of them, and most of them have experienced symptoms similar to ones mentioned on these related sites, mainly that the battery will display 75% or so, and then magically drop to 5%. We have contacted IBM about this, and their solution was to (a) give us different laptops, while charging us an enormous fee for getting out of our lease, or (b) sell us batteries at a slightly discounted rate.
We have been buying batteries to replace when students' laptops get below 19 Watt-hours left of life, or if the battery does the fail. Some of these batteries have only been used for 300-400 charge cycles. Failures should come this quickly!
Don't ping my cheese with your bandwidth!
Yeah; I've got three friends who've got the same Latitude CPx or CPi (or something very similar) series laptops -- two completely fell apart at the hinges, the other is on its way to falling apart as well.
that said; I also know people who have relatively new top-of-the-line Dell laptops and they seem extremely solid...
Does anyone else have a big ugly bald spot on their keyboard? Usually where your right wrist would be resting. Apparently the black resin/paint is broken down by excessive contact with human skin/sweat. This component is as poorly-engineered as the batteries in question, yet IBM does not consider this to be their responsibility. I can find replacements easy enough on E-bay, but why should I be wasting my money to buy flawed replacements?
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
We bought over 120 IBM ThinkPad 600 and 600Es in 1998-2000. The ThinkPads are awesome machines except for the battery life. IBM has admitted to us (at least as much as IBM ever admits to anything) that there are some issues with the batteries and possibly even the charge controllers. They have been fairly good about swapping out batteries even those out of warrenty.
If you or RPI is spending a few million dollars a year with IBM and aren't getting your batteries replaced, someone needs to lean on IBM.
Of course, if you're not spending big bucks with IBM, suck it up. The battery is nearly four years old. How long did you expect it to last? Replacing the battery once a year doesn't sound that bad, does it?
(After-market batteries are available for the 600-series. Rebuilds are also out there. You may want to check those out. They don't last any longer than the IBM batteries (since it seems to be the charge controller) but cost about half to 75% as much.)
InitZero
Any idea if this works for Li-Ion batteries as well? It almost sounds too good to be true...
It's not my fault - greatness was thrust upon me.
Yes, I've got a 600e and it's eaten two batteries (and the third is starting on the downward curve.) It's a couple of years old, so I guess it's not that bad.
;-))
However, a couple things to consider. There are at least three ways to get replacements from IBM. One is full retail - it's very expensive and not a good idea. Another is to call about the warranty, even if it's out of warranty. They offered to give me a battery for half price if I shipped them the old one. Lastly, if it's under warranty they'll send you a new one and a prepaid box to send the old one back.
Another thing to consider when discussing rechargeable batteries is that you need to look and see what technology the battery in question is. Lots of people are spouting off stuff about full discharge, topping off, etc, but that's all a load if they don't know what kind of batteries you've got. NiMh != Nicads != Lithium Ion. Proper care of each is fairly different - Li Ion being the strangest. Do some googling and you can find articles about proper care for each type of battery.
My 600E has/had Li Ion batteries and I was surprised to read one day that it damages them to discharge them below 40% capacity. Couple that with a fixed number of recharge cycles (where going from 95% to 100% counts as a cycle) and you see that any time you run on batteries, you should go down to 40% and then recharge.
Also note that the latest BIOS for the 600E won't start a recharge cycle unless the battery is below 95%, which is a good thing. IBM also recommends that you upgrade the configuration utility when you call about the battery warranty - they claim somehow the newer version is better for the batteries as well.
Given that I run Linux I have my doubts that it matters to me, but I did update it in case it tweaked some setting in the hardware.
All in all I've been looking at a battery every 18 months as part of the cost of ownership. If that bothered me a whole lot, I'd take the batteries out unless I really needed them and store them however is appropriate for the technology.
(Enough rambling for now
For the 2000 600/600e's that my office is responsible for. That is over three years. We have seven other techs who have changed out about the same number. So in three years, we have had to change out over 1400 batteries.
wife has an ibook. it's 1 year 8 months old, still has 2.5 hour battery life!
I worked in a support role for amjor company, and the IBM TP 600 series batteries just failed to hold charges after years of use. It didn't matter if they were constantly docked or split between wall power and battery power. They all became symptomatic.
I've been using nicads intensely since they were invented and never had any "memory" effect appear. I did sometimes get overcharge induced voltage depression until I got a decent charger, but never anything like "memory".
We have almost 50 of these machines at work and they chew batteries.
My Dell Inspiron 8100 has gone through three batteries and is on its fourth currently. This battery has already lost 15% of its nominal discharge time just through normal use. I'm now beyond the warranty replacement period and do not intend to purchase more batteries for this machine. It's going to become a desktop.
This type of 'smart battery' is flawed at best and I wish more people would have pointed it out sooner. I'm glad this article was posted at least, but be aware, this is universal to all laptops using a smart battery, not just IBM ThinkPads.
// -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ --
For all of my laptops, I made it a habit to discharge the battery to about 10% every two to three weeks and recharge it when the unit is off. If I'm not going to be using the battery I take it out and leave it in the laptop bag.
Pretty simple but tedious. At the same time, however, I have not had to purchase a replacement battery for any laptop I've ever owned.
As a side note, I gave my Thinkpad 600 to my mother about a year ago and she has never had a problem either. She still discharges the battery to 10% once a month and it is still in good condition.
here at work we leased the 600e laptops for our users until the T series laptops came out and i have to agree that the batteries dont last long at all....NONE of them (we have around 2000 laptops leased at any one time, so we dealt with this problem A LOT). the problem is the fucking "trickle charge" that these things are set up with: when plugged in, the laptop still goes on battery power, meaning that the battery charge is always fluctuating between 99 and 100 percent (very VERY horrible for battery life). the newer T series actually switch off of battery power when plugged in, so this problem has pretty much gone away.
Gentlemen...BEHOLD!
-Dr. Weird
Or used to until a couple of weeks ago, anyway this is all still valid...
If your laptop is under warranty just send it in. The repair facility is not owned by IBM, and the policies are pretty lax. If you send in your laptop complaining of battery problems, 9 times out of 10 the tech will replace the battery without even testing it. If they should happen to test it and think you are wrong they are required to contact you before sending it back unrepaired. When they call, just bitch enough and you'll get your battery (but bitch in a polite tone of voice).
The turn around time for the each unit is 24 or 48 hours, meaning your laptop can't be at the depot for any longer than the designated time (most are 48, but they try to do it in 24 anyway). This means that if you send in your laptop on Monday, you'll probably have it back by Thursday (and possibly Wednesday), and with a brand new battery. Note, this only works for units under warranty. If you purchased the extended warranty it will be honored. If your warranty has expired in the last 30 days that's ok too, you're still covered.
The majority of our employees have about a 30 second battery life (just enough to run from an office to a conference room), and for budgetary reasons we can't afford to keep replacing them every 6 months.
It used to be the case that you could get an adaptor for using "standard" batteries (AA) in gateway notebook computers. If such a device is avalible for the IBM 600 notebooks you could get one and insert standard rechargeable batteries.
In the mean time I'm glad I bought a desknote.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
I have two IBM 600 series laptops and I guess others are having the same problems. One of my batteries stopped working one day and not too soon after that the other battery stopped working in the other laptop as well. Funny thing is that one is a 266mhz model and the other one is a 366mhz model. Weird...
I use a IBM 600e supplied by my work and wiped the NT that was preinstalled on it and currently have RedHat 8.0 installed. Little Gnome app says battery is fully charged I disconnect the power cord and get maybe ten minutes of use before bang the system is beeping and the battery monitor app tells me 5% of the charge is left. I've switched batteries, I've drained the battery and then did a full charge but to no avail still same result ten minutes of use and bang battery is going down to 5% or 2%. Since I didn't pay for the laptop I really don't care but if there is a solution or fix to the problem it would be great be be able to use the laptop on my hour train ride in the morning and again in the evening. Look forward to any follow up posting and I'll continue to read the replies to see if anyone does know of a fix.
My university uses a22m's, and we have a similar problem. We're under contract to IBM so we get replacements pretty cheap, but they have a similar problem. Over time, we've noticed that if you fail to discharge the battery fully about once a week, it will develop a memory, even though they're not supposed to. I ruined my last battery in just under a semester of use.
I tell ye, The 3XX series had the same problems. The mroe times you replaced the battery the less life the had. I had 3 380's plugged in 100% of the time.
if you don't feel better tomorrow, we'll just cut your legs off about here. - Theodoric of York
I can confirm the 600 series battery issue. I used to recommend Thinkpads in favour to other LapTops because of IBM's excellent local service. This has changed dramatically in the last year. LTs now are serviced interstate and usually take week or more to come back. This is as bad as Apple's Powerbook service and simply unacceptable for business users. I'd rather sell a No-brand LT now for the price of the average IBM repair job - users just take the chance and simply replace the LT when broken. I can see the day when chinese branded LTs cost less the an IBM battery.
My Thinkpad 600 reports a full battery and after about 30 minutes of use it says there's less than 5% left. It just drops off like that. Crappy. I use my laptop mainly plugged in so it doesn't bother me but still....
I support a couple hundred users with IBM 600s, they all have terrible batteries. In fact I have a stack of bad batteries sitting on my desk. Avg life of them is 15 - 20 minutes. I've gotten new batteries and they seem to last about 6 months before going down the drain.
That was my solution for my 600e's battery woes, and it works like a charm. Most places I inhabit have electrical power available, either via a wall outlet or a 12VDC socket, and I always had adapters with me. A battery that's not plugged in will not get so decrepit so quickly. It's been a couple of years now and the second battery is still as fresh as the day I bought it.
Problems with this solution: The need to carry your adapter around, the sudden death of your computing experience when the power plug accidentally slips out. If you compute on a desk, I'd certainly encourage you to simply slip the battery off once it's reached 90-100% charge.
Currently, I have a Thinkpad A21p, and while I use my battery more heavily nowadays, I still generally keep it out of the laptop, and it's been lasting relatively long for its age.
hrm. then again. maybe not.
I have a umax Laptop. I have two batteries that won't hold a charge, at all, so it sits on the kitchen table plugged into the wall. Sure it's portable, but not wireless.
I've used a steady series of IBM thinkpads for the last several (6+) years. Overall they are great systems, particularly the higher end models. Pricy of course but generally among the best out there quality-wise. (I've also worked with Dells, Toshiba's and Compaqs so I've got significant time on other makes in case you wondered) If price isn't an issue I generally think Thinkpads are among the best choices to make. That said...
I have to concur though that the batteries in the 600 series do seem to have problems. I bought a 600E for my dad a while back and it definitely goes through batteries more quickly than the 700 series I used to use at work or the T30 I have now. Right now he can get about 30 minutes of charge out of his system with a battery he bought just a few months ago.
One thing I've taken to with my T30 is to use a second battery in the Ultrabay. Since I don't need my CD drive with incredible regularity I normally just run with 2 batteries. Best decision I've made. New the batteries could run for ~5.5 hours if I turned the screen brightness down. They've lost a little (expected) but still I can run without AC for 4-4.5 hours. If you have a thinkpad, get the second battery. Well worth the investment.
Apple does 3 things right on the power front.
1. CPU's draw less power. While Apple uses the same CPUs in it's laptops as it's desktops (And the same core logic), it's CPU's are very energy efficient. This does allow them to have a nearly unnoticable performance gap, unlike the desktop world (A 1.8GHz Mobile P4 is not faster than a 1GHz standard G4).
2. Big Honking batteries. Apple uses 47, 55 and 61 watt-hour batteries, most PC laptops top out at 38-40 watt-hours. Between this and the much lower draw CPU's is why 'Books see 4-6 hour battery life and PC's see 2.5 hours on a good day.
3. High Quality Batteries. Apple buys Sony batteries. This is one reason that you seem to get less laptop for more cash. It's also a reason why apple batteries last 3-5 years and PC batteries don't. Cheap ass batteries (Like those in low-end Thinkpads) don't last.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
I probably fully discharge the Thinkpad battery 2 or 3 times a year but most of the time it's on AC power with the battery still installed. I now get just over 2 hours out of it now( used to get 2.5 hrs ).
Are they using cheaper battery technology, bad charge circuits or are they pulling the razor/razor-blade sales tactic? Those batteries are not cheap at retail so if they died in less than 2 years.....
Wait. I just realized also that I'm running a 120MHz CPU and todays CPU's are in the GHz range and will have to push alot more current through them when on battery power. It could take it's toll on the battery life.
I still wouldn't doubt the razor-blade mentality of designing these to go bad faster to make money on replacement parts. It's the typical American business way of thinking. IMHO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
i'm on my second dead battery in a year and a half with my 600e. my year old ibook, though, which i use daily works beautifully.
i remember, when i was a kid, a lot of rechargeable batteries required you to run them down all the way before charging them up and i wondered if i was just charging it wrong. i write a power daemon to print the charge level and watched it run down: 100%, 98%, 95%, 90%, 85%, *shutdown*.
now i think i know why i couldn't figure out the right balance between use and charging --it didn't exist. i don't have these problems with my ibook, nor --thinking back-- did i with my toshiba satellite (what was it, a 1600? so hard to remember the 386 days).
a battery should last longer than six months.
other than that, it's a nice laptop, almost no work at all installing freebsd on it. the battery bit's just a shame.
"Mister Potato-head --MISTER POTATO-HEAD! Backdoors are not secrets!" (War Games, 1983)
According to this page, IBM is one of the few "Name" Brand companies that produce their own laptops.
I have an HP Omnibook 800CT which I bought about four years ago when HP was having a make-them-go-away clearance sale. Small, cute, a bit slow by today's standards, but runs Linux great.
The 800CT uses a LIon battery. In anticipation of possible battery problems, I purchased a spare, but it has never needed to be put to use. The original battery has maintained its charge life over the four years I've had it.
HP had a truly gifted team designing the 800CT. It's a damn shame they abandoned it.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I was amazed to find that the battery in my relatively new Toshiba Satellite is the exact same model as in a friend's vintage 386 based model. The only difference is the total capacity (2600mAh as opposed to 4000mAh). Otherwise they are interchangeable. This makes replacement batteries plentiful and inexpensive, especially if you are willing to swap batteries more often. Newly manufactured replacements sell as low as $10 on Ebay. This is opposed to a scheme like IBM's where every model year has a new battery design. Smaller markets make for higher priced replacement parts.
When I got my ThinkPad 600e used, it had about one hour worth of battery life. Within one year (and only moderate use, as it is not my primary laptop) that fell to seconds, and finally to zero.
I no longer keep the battery in the bay, as it is just dead weight. It really is a shame, since it is the perfect laptop for Linux (well supported hardware save the modem, three mouse buttons). I currently use the laptop only while tethered to AC.
I have used WinBook, Acer, Toshiba and Dell notebooks. Their battery life is pretty good. I would suggest disabling sounds to GUI events to get more battery life.
Do you have enough RAM in the laptop? Excessive paging uses more electricity with the constant hard disk access.
Lastly, if possible, operate the notebook with full charge/discharge cycles. I mean, really flatten the battery, then charge it. This is also good advice for mobile phones.
Mike
While I ordered a new LION batterey for my Thinkpad i1400 from their 1-888-shop-ibm # - they have a nice disclaimer the sales person told me twice while I placed my order
"Our prices are liable to change without notice and we make no guarantees with our batterey life after the limited warranty period"
My options were either 1) don't buy the batterey and don't use my laptop or 2) Buy the batterey and hope it works for more than a day.
Ave Molech Setting
I have a Thinkpad A31 for school...
It doesn't get much more than 1:45 of battery life, though advertised for much more.
All IBM Thinkpads are advertised to have real good battery life. None have them. It's bad (or good depending on how you look at it) marketing, combined with real power hungry computers.
Up until last week I had at ThinkPAD 600 series, and was alway swapping batteries with other people, as their's had stopped working.
Luckily it was stolen last week, so I have a nice 'new' desktop to play with.
"Watch the skies, keep watching the skies"
Laptop batteries die in 1-3 years so laptop companies are assured of continuous $$$. (Maybe they design it to die as fast.) They also change battery designs often (why?!?) and phase out old battery designs without notice. That's why there's no sense buying refurbished laptops.
Will someone explain why 60 laptop manufacturers have 200+ kinds of batteries, all non-interchangeable??
Taking care of batteries:
I'm also a student at RPI, but I'm a year lounger than you. The laptop for the freshman that year was an IBM T20, which I still use. It's also common knowledge here at RPI that the laptop batteries will not last more than a year and a half unless you're really lucky.
This comptuer has performed as well or better than the other computers I've ever used, except that I have this exact problem with the battery. Until about a year ago, my bttery was fine, but i noticed that over the summer, it didn't last longer than 40 minutes. Now, 6 months later, its life is approximately 20 minutes before giving me dire warnings about losing data. I wish that RPI had told how to use the batteries so that they would not die like this. All they told us was that if we started discharging the battery, let it fully drain.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
I'm sorry, but this is a bit unfeasible.
1. Isn't it desirable (from the user's perspective) to keep the battery trickle-charging to make up for when you suspend it and let the battery keep the RAM fresh and crispy?
2. Many laptops lack a "modesty panel". To take my laptop without a battery risks introducing nasties to the battery slot. I don't want that.
3. They've been doing battery-powered portable computers since at least the late 1980s. By now, shouldn't we be able to expect a better answer than "Don't do that... we know it's a problem?"
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
I had a Dell Inspiron 7500 previously, and it took about 6-8 months for the on-line time to go from around 2 hours per pattery to a paltry 30-40 minutes. I am currently running a T30, and I consistently get about 2.5 hours on a single charge. Granted, it's only about 3-4 months old.
Here are some tips for improving battery life, some of which may have already been mentioned. I used these on my Inspiron, and got some of my battery life back. Try this:
- Set any wireless or peripheral cards to use power-save mode whenever possible. Wireless cards REALLY suck up the battery power.
- Turn the screen brightness down a bit if you can.
- Using headphones while on battery power, especially the larger ones, can also have a noticeable impact on battery life. Consider going to smaller headphones, or none at all.
- Do the complete discharge/recharge method. This is hard when you have a docking station at work, and you're moving around a lot, but try to let the battery discharge completely before charging it whenever possible. Laptop batteries as well as cell phone batteries have memories...
- Set your power consumption settings to be pretty conservative when on battery power - short delays for disk spin-down, short delays for "idle" times, etc.
- Someone once told me that leaving a laptop plugged in all day with the battery in as well is bad for it, and shortens the life. I don't know about the veracity of this statement, but you might consider removing the battery (if possible) when keeping the laptop plugged in or on the dockign station. I'd be interested to know if anyone out there has any success with this, or notices any difference.
- Try to keep your laptop as cool as possible, so the fan doesn't kick in as much. Consider getting a lap board rather than that fluffy pillow to put between it and your lap, so that the heat from the thing doesn't end your dreams of ever having children. My Dell fan used to run ALL THE TIME.
Hope some of these help, and of course, some of them are long term solutions. You'll just have to work through the pain of complete discharges, etc.
Good luck!
----
Wyntermute, resident psychopath
"Remember that you're unique - just like everyone else!"
I called support, told them my battery was broken, and they sent me a new one.
I put it in, and after charging for a day, I unplugged and went on battery -- Same thing happened, 100% to 5% in 5 minutes. So I called them back.
When I told the support guy what happened, he said something to the effect of "opps, I was afraid of that. So, do you feel comfortable changing a motherboard in a laptop, or would you like to send it in."
They sent me both a motherboard and another battery. Since then, things have been much better, and I haven't had a problem. I won't say I've timed how long the machine lasts, but its reasonable.
BTW -- The motherboard was really killing the batteries, not just showing the wrong voltage. I borrowed a co-worker's battery, and when he used it in his machine again, it wouldn't hold a charge. He had to get a replacement too.
Cheers, Greg
just picked one of these up the other day. got 2.4.20 w/ apm in kernel running on it. set up a script to monitor its power consumption, and just let it sit for most of a day. discharged normally from 96% to 37%, then dropped to 5% over the course of 1 minute and ticked down to 1% before i shut it down and recharged it. so, the first theory was, well, its a 6 cell pack, perhaps 2 of the cells are going bad (resulting in ~32% or 1/3 of the 'available' charge going away), but since then, i've used it 2 more times, where i've run it down quite a bit, and the 'big drop' point seems to be getting lower (aka last time i checked, it went from 34% to 5%, which isn't great, but if the trend continues, the battery will seem to 'recover').
time to karma whore:
Another Thinkpad 600 users' battery stories
excerpts from the linux mailing list about the problem
and another users overview of the battery problem on the thinkpad 600
apmiser which you can get with tpctl will help your batteries last longer while you're on the road (note: you'll need APM support in the kernel to use'em)
Tips for better life out of LiIon batteries
Um, shouldn't at least 49% of all users of a particular type of laptop experience "shorter-than-average" battery life? Assuming a normal distribution of battery lives, that is.
I use to work on IBM thinkpads back in 96 till about june of 2000. I was (still am if it didn't expire already) trained on them. The thinkpad 600's had some really bad batteries. If my memory is correct I believe there was even a service bulletin about them. I can't get that system any more but it was a special website certified techs could get into.
There was a test you could do on them with a volt/ohm meter. There were 4 terminals on the battery where it connected to the laptop. I think you did the voltage check from 1 and 4 and if it was under 11 volts even after a re-charge the battery is bad. If the voltage was over 11 volts you then measured the resistance between terminals 3 and 4 . The resistance had to be in the range from something like 4 to 20 to 30k ohms. If the resistance was outside of this range you need to replace the battery. If it was correct you need to replace the system board.
These batteries have a thermal fuse (of sorts) in them that regulated how much of a charge they needed. After repeated charging the heat would burn it up and battery would have a internal open circuit or short out.
The place where I worked had dozens upon dozens of TP 600,E,X 760's (many types), 770,X . They were/are great laptops but those batteries in the TP600's SUCKED really bad.
"I have gone to look for myself, If I return before I get back keep me here"
My girlfriend's Thinkpad 600 has the dead battery syndrome. The machine can now last for perhaps 15 minutes on battery power before crapping out.
My Dell Inspiron 3700, roughly the same age, gets almost 8 hours on its two batteries. But it has a different problem - the cooling fan bearings are dying, and the machine is LOUD. So much so that I can't use it in public without.
jonathan
Mine has been working from when I first got it in 1999. I must be one lucky son of a DOT COM
Excuse my ignorance, but why would anyone continue to buy IBM laptop batteries if 2 or more of them failed? Also, why would you not use the batteries' warranty? Just tossing them away and buying new ones is kinda stupid...
How many of you are going to put your 600something-or-other out on E-bay? Dont really need batteries, give me two AC adaptors, one at work and one at home...
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Laptop batteries are disposable components with a very limited lifetime. You will have to replace them after a year or two. Every manufacturer and every experienced user knows this. The same is true for AC adapters. These, too, are designed to break.
Laptops are only just taking to grab the market, after desktop PCs have become commonplace and profit margins declined, the best profits are now in mobile computing.
But I still wonder why we, the users, accept overpriced short-life batteries, after all these years.
A few weeks ago, I wrote up a text for an online petition with a long list of reasons why we need an industry standard for laptop batteries, similar to consumber electronics battery cells.
Noone really showed interest, though, so I didn't expect enough people to join the cause and haven't started the actual petition.
So again, I welcome your comments.
(And I'm looking for someone willing to host the petition, too, since my puny web server isn't quite ready for that...)
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
I used to work for an IBM business partner, we all had thinkpads of various kinds. We all thought the battery lives sucked.
I usually worked at a desk, I'd use mains power (and charge the battery all day, then next morning turn it on and use battery power till it beeped at me when I'd plug it in. On a new thinkpad this was about an hour, after six months it was 10 minutes, after 8 months it had about 30secs of life.
I had a 380 and then an iSeries 1500, both the same.
Careful with the Best Buy approach. A few years ago my Toshiba Satellite laptop battery died while still under warranty at Best Buy, so I took it back there and clearly explained the problem and that I was just looking for a new battery. 2 weeks later I got my laptop back with the hard drive reformatted.
A co-worker had a similar problem a couple weeks ago with a key on his keyboard not working. Same thing - they reformatted and he lost everything.
Obviously you should back everything up before you take it in for repair but it's still poor service on their part. What if I were an average Best Buy customer who knew nothing about computers? I'd be confused as hell when I turned it on to find nothing there, not even an operating system. The worst part was, they didn't even replace the battery that time. I had to take it back AGAIN.
Dang, in 1989 all they had for undergrads was a mainframe running MTS! Wasn't till '90 that they got SparcStations and IBM RISC 6000s...
Cool deal with the laptop, but , for 25k+ a year, it should be gold plated!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
My FX-301's battery lasts about 30 minutes and has ever since I got it last year. The advertised life of a charge is supposed to be 2 hours.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
Batteries can last, and they go bad quickly. The have memory, they have no memory. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I've got a similar problem with a 867Mhz one that I just bought.
It only charges up to 97-99%. I've found that if I then unplug it for like 10 minutes or so, that it will usually charge all the way up to 100%. Though if I then use it for a couple more hours sometimes the charge drops back down to 97%.
I really don't know if this is a problem or not. I'd rather have a batery that always charges to %97 and then a dead battery that charges to 100%.
If it causes any problem, then I've got a year to detect it though. You can always buy applecare if you really think it will be a problem. Though I do wish that there was a supplier of non-apple batterys for the Powerbooks so that I could compare between them if I wanted.
I am glad that I got a Mac though. This computer is awesome.
First the whole 75GXP harddrive fiasco (my second one just failed, thanks IBM!)...
Now the batteries...
IBM hardware has jumped the shark!!!
I'm not sure if I remember this right, but I seemed to recall that I COULDN'T update the BIOS because the BIOS flash dependency checks to see if you have a fully charged battery (so in case of power failure, it could use the battery power to finish the flash).
I never did resolve that issue, I ended up letting someone else use the laptop as an always-plugged in desktop.
I thought it was kind of strange that both batteries died around the same time. Since I am almost never in a place where I have to use the laptop on the road, I don't need to get a new $150 battery for the system. The battery lasts long enough that I can move the laptop from one room to another. The main annoyance is that the "battery is low" light is flashing all of the time, even when the system is plugged in.
ThinkPad 600X (the predessor to the T series), running RedHat Linux 7.2. Has NeoMagic chipset which causes the system to crash hard when running certain X applications.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Not a rant or a flame, but I think it's worth noting that the processors Apple uses are significantly slower than the PC processors you're comparing them to. Apple propaganda aside, the most powerful PowerBook Apple makes isn't even close to having the same amount of processing power a top 'o the line Thinkpad has.
This isn't to say the Apples are worthless -- far from it. It's just that they're not for everyone.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Nice bit of flamebait there.
I have a three year old 600X. The battery lasts maybe five minutes; both of my 600X battery went very quickly from lasting an hour or so to lasting five minutes.
This is the output of APM on this 600X:
vela 16:47:10 $ apm
AC off-line, battery status high: 94% (0:03)
How often is your laptop plugged in to the mains, and how often do you use it "in the field"?
Another poster suggested running a 600X battery all the way down once every two weeks; I didn't get these problems until my system was continously plugged in for long periods of time. Before, I would use it in places without a convenient plug, or have it unplugged when it was sleeping. Once I kept in plugged in all of the time, even when suspended (sleeping), the batteries (both of them) quickly went poof.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Unfortunately you can't update your bios without a charged battery in your laptop.
I have an Inspiron 8000, and for me also, even new, it got about a 45 min battery life. I have had it just over a year and ALWAYS run it off of the AC. Not to mention, I just updated Win2k with SP3 and now it doesn't suspend properly, either. Should I get a new battery and only plug in the AC when it is almost dead? Should I complain? I have seen on the website they offer a double-capacity battery (for a not-so-modest price), but man these are expensive. Should I call and complain forcefully?
I had no idea laptop batteries died this frequently. I've got a Dell Latitude with two LiIon batteries, and they've been going good for a little over 3 years now. I use this laptop quite frequently, for taking notes in class, and it spends a fair amount of time off of wall current. I guess I only use it about 15 hours a week, is that low? Are we talking only 1 year for people who use their laptops 40+ hours a week?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I know its not exactly for 600e's but this may help. We sell both 600x series and the 390's at the store where I work and sometimes use a util from IBM for 'refreshing' the batteries. It seems to reset some sort of fully charged indicator in the battery. Like any good IBM utility its completely vague, full of lengthy click through agreements and requires a dos/9x environment to extract itself onto a bootable floppy.
...
Maybe this will help some folks out there
STANDARDS: The principles we use to reject other people's code.
I had two Li batterys for my cheap CTX laptop. They started off lasting an hour, After six months they last twenty minutes and not long after were dead. Since I allways haul it around in its padded suitcase I got three
:-O
6Volts 10AH lead acid batterys for about E30 total which fit in a section of the bag. Added about 1Kg to the weight. The mains PSU puts out 20V DC so the 18V from the batterys runs it nicly for about 10 hours. I made a little adaptor with a diode and a resistor so I can trickle charge the batterys with the laptop psu, though after a trip I usually put the batterys on proper charger.
My laptop has a built in switching regulator and runs happily from 10.5V to 20V but some, like those Sony Vios I can't afford need, a regulated input.
I hook the three batterys together with some short wire with spade connectors. I didn't want to put an inline fuse in each wire so if I ever get the connections seriously wrong there will be some fireworks that won't be appriciated on a packed train.
My years of ham radio, building electronic projects and seeing idiots
weld spanners to industrial UPS battery stacks have taught me to be
carefull with high-current batterys.
I used a TP600 at work for 2 years and had no problems with this. The only issue I had with the battery was with it only lasting an hour or so when I took it off AC power. I've since been upgraded to a T21 which does much better and lasts 2-3 hours off AC.
I went to dinner with a CEO at a johnson and johnson subsidiary company the other night, and we were taling about experiances with different laptops, ranging from dell to apple. I said that IBM makes quality laptops but for a premium (my personal experiance). He quickly said "oh god they don't, we purchased several hundred laptops from them and everyone has had a battery problem, and we're losing a rediculous ammount of money buying everyone new ones every few weeks".
I didn't ask about the model numbers, but when I saw this article I just thought throw that out there.
How about doing a Slashdot Pole on how long your laptop battery lasted? Let's get some real data.
I can't install a new bios because my battery died. Linux won't install, OpenBSD and NetBSD won't install. Fortunately FreeBSD works.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
What I want to know, is why the hell did my sound stop working in NT. I just started getting these messages saying that the driver couldn't load. The hardware is fine -- I can get sound when I boot to the Linux, just not in NT. I updated my drivers, fiddled with the IRQ settings, but nada.
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-5.htm
The basic gist of it is this:
Lithium-ion has low maintenance, low self-discharge rate, and battery packs have built in circuitry to protect the pack from complete discharge and damage. I point you to the quote "Some capacity deterioration is noticeable after one year, whether the battery is in use or not."
I have recently replaced the battery in my Dell laptop after it's 1.5th birthday. Pricy, but all the research I did indicated that that's the lifetime of the pack, wether used or not.
Seriously, the (simple) replacement of a $100 part once a year for the life of a $1000-3000 device is part of the TCO.
We later went out to purchase another 1000 laptops and desktops (a $2 million dollar order). We told IBM to not even bother bidding because they refused to take care of the laptop problem. It was then that they FINALLY acknowledged that they had a problem with their batteries and offered to take care of it by sending us out 200 new batteries!
We told them to stick it because we were replacing the laptops, they had lived their life. Our end users were upset and didn't want IBM ever again, laptop or desktop. IBM wound up losing a major account due to those stupid batteries.
The irony of the situation is IBM's website that states:
Thanks to IBM's advanced power management systems, the ThinkPad's battery life has earned a powerhouse of a reputation. [HA!] But as all travelers know, extra batteries can still be your best friend. [In this case, PLENTY of extra Batteries] With ThinkPad's battery and power options, you can ensure that your notebook is always ready when you are.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
This is a well documented (not by IBM though) problem with the ThinkPad 600 series. I have two worthless batteries sitting in my closet. Also, I seem to remember reading that this model does not fare well when Linux is installed, i.e. the battery dies even quicker. Here are some links you should check out. here here, and here.
I have some NiMH AAA batteries for my Clie peg-sl10.
What charging policy should I use for them? Run them dry or keep them capped? Charge them for as
long as possible, or shoot for charging them to 90%, so as not to overcharge?
-------
Incite and flee.
sounds painful? Would be. Try setting fire to one of those disposable lithium cell batteries. Then imagine what a laptop battery on fire would be like.
FYI, the chip in the battery sends I2C messages to the keyboard controller, telling it to stop charging the battery. If you ever get in to laptop BIOS hacking, the 'stop charging me now' message is the one thing you never, ever, mess with.
Actually, the BBB exists for the "Business" and not
the consumer. I swear their role is specifically to
"make the annoying consumer shut the fuck up and
take some sort of pitiance and go away" instead of
actual problem resolving. They tend to pretend they
are some sort of government sanctioned agency,
which they ARE NOT, instead of the private company
they are. Your absolute best course of action is:
#1 check all company's out at www.resellerrating.com
before making a purchase. And a note: just because
they have a high rating doesn't mean you shouldn't
read the comments posted by prior customers, and
you shouldn't pay special attention to how good
they are at refunds/replacements. A lot of these
fly-by-night companys have high ratings, but
extremely low ratings for warrantee service. As
long as what you get from them works, great. But
you can be SOL if you get sent something broken.
#2 If you do get screwed, use google to find out
what state the company does business in, and
contact that states ATTORNEY GENERAL'S OFFICE for
consumer affairs. Almost all states have an online
complaint filing system. The good thing about
going through the AG is that your complaint will
stay on file forever. The next person that files
a complaint will add to the pile, and they'll
notice. I've had 4 experiences recently with the
AG's consumer affairs offices in NJ, NY, CA, and
TX, and they ALL got me my refund/replacements
within a month. They all have an online fraud
complaint filing system. Hope this helps.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
my notebook is 2 years old, and the battery life of the lithium-ion batter has been chopped in half. anyone else have this problem?
Wow, I had no idea there were others out there who feel my pain! Hang in there, brother! Anyways, yah, my IBM 600e laptop's batter last for only 20-25 minutes now. The smart monitoring is buggy. In either windows or linux, when apm gets down to %50, it automatically jumps to %5. Yes, I was pissed too. Also, the track-pointer mouse goes off the wall like flee on crack whenever i touch it. Its uncontrollable. I don't know if everybody else has this problem, but its really annoying.
Considering most laptops now have Li-Ion batteries and most BIOS code is shadowed in RAM and can be modified by the OS (assuming you have root or administrator privs) it could be one NASTY payload for a virus.
Well, consider that the 1GHz G4 will run circles around the 1.2GHz and 1.33GHz P3 and Celeron's currently available in low-end laptops while still having 2-3x the battery life of those laptops. The G4 is a much more efficient CPU when it comes to power dissipation, as compared to any mobile CPU other than the Crusoe (Which is slower than anything other than a Via C3).
And I Think you'll find that the 1GHz G4 in the 15" and 17" Powerbooks compares pretty well to a 2GHz Mobile P4. The Mobile P4 is noticably slower than a desktop P4, and the G4 is pretty competetive with a 1.6GHz or 1.7GHz Desktop P4.
Is the 1GHz G4 faster than a 2.0GHz mobile P4? likely only in FPU or SIMD stuff, if at all, is it in the same ballpark (And Likely faster than the 1.6-1.8GHz Mobile Celeron's), sure. It's got at least a 1.5x advantage at the same clock speed over the P4, and it's not a performance-crippled Mobile part, so I can see it doing in the mobile market what it can only dream of doing in the desktop market.
The Powerbooks compete much better than PowerMacs when comparing them to the equivalent PC's. They have a big advantage in being able to use desktop CPU's instead of purpose built, crippled Mobile CPU's.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
Sanyo. Seriously, Sanyo.
now, I only says this from *MY* experiences. MY IBM laptop lost about 1/3 of its capacity after 11 charge-discharge cycles. ELEVEN.
both Li-Ion batteries are from Sanyo (the other one seem to have held up, though).
When I got my Dell, one battery was Sanyo and one was Panasonic. Guess what, Sanyo lost about 10% of its capacity after three or four cycles.
These days I avoid Sanyo by all means if possible. So far panasonic gets by vote, though they don't seem to be as far ahead on the technology curve. (their AAA NiMH batteries are rated 2Ah while almost all other manufactures are at 2.1Ah (IIRC 5% increase is about an one year research - battery wise))
ironically, Sanyo built probably the world's largest solar powerplant in Japan. I shudder to think if someday I have no choice but be powered by them.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
If you wish to compare a top-end G4 to a low-end Celeron, then you're right, but then you're paying an incredible price differential for said Mac.
As for the mobile P4 being slower than a desktop P4, you're quite wrong there. Depending upon the user's power-saving options, the mobile P4 can be just as fast as a desktop unit, albeit at a cost of battery runtime. This is, of course, the object of the debate, but it's unfair to say that the mobile P4 is slower as a blanket statement. It can be, but it doesn't have to be.
Lastly, I'll take issue with your idea of a crippled mobile CPU. It's not crippled, unless you consider the addition of ruthless power saving circuitry "crippling". Again, you don't have to engage these features if you don't want to. You can set yourself up for maximum speed and it will run circles around a G4, at a cost of battery life. While the G4 will last longer, you do not have the option of bumping up your performance in lieu of battery life, so in this instance it is the Mac that is less accomodating.
But there's one thing neither of us has mentioned just yet. Just how fast does a desktop really need to be? If you're just surfing, answering mail, and composing documents or spreadsheets, does it really matter all that much whether you've got a 1GHz G4, a 1.6GHz Celeron, or a 2GHz P4? I'd wager that it makes very little difference overall. Playing games, 3D rendering...that takes horsepower, but who uses a laptop for that? Not many people.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
i have a t20 thinkpad i got in 2000 and its battery died after about 18 months. it too was tied to the wall for a while before i could dish out the $190 for a new one
1. Update your BIOS!!
2. Rip open your battery and replace the Sanyo parts with Panasonic.
I did this in 1999 and still get about 60% out of the batteries...
On the other side of the screen it all looked so easy.
Batteries do seem to be quite a bone of contention amongst those of us living the mobile computing lifestyle; and most will agree, no matter how long they actually last, its never long enough. I have however, owned numerous different models, and its true that certain practices do help, some a holdover from the stone age when all things rechargeable used NiCd packs, and some a simple adaptation to the fact that the most popular OSes out there really are frelled when it comes to power management. Once upon a time, power management was provided almost exclusively by the hardware; specialized circuits designed explicitly for one machine based on current draw, battery type and capacity, and a predefined minimum supply voltage were used, and for the most part, all one had to do was be sure to remove the battery while on AC and remember to occasionally discharge the battery completely and recharge it to get the most life out of it. This arrangement was good up to a point, but it was usually static, your anticipated run time and reserve power level were based on hardware which made no allowances for aging batteries and which would, if permitted to, eventually cook cells which were unable to come up to a certain level. Later developments in the hardware permitted them to monitor and learn the changing discharge curves of aging batteries, these worked well, as they were still custom designed to work with the machine and the batteries installed in the machine. Witness to this is one old Toshiba 420 CDT I use for a semiconductor cross-reference database and tech tips - after almost 8 years, the original Li-Ion pack is still good for over an hour, and when new it was only good for an hour and a half. With the advent of the APM battery slot, and OSes allegedly designed to use them, came the need for a "one-size-fits-all" approach to provide compatibility. This would have been a good idea I suppose, having the OS deal with all that, but as most of us have found out, the OS isn't very good at it. Running a background process to monitor and maintain battery voltage via a generic controller embedded in the battery pack does take away a lot of hassles in the design department, but in turn it means that what is monitored may very well be erroneous - Win98/XP APM will mislearn a power curve if you short cycle the batteries - so badly that in one laptop I own, it tells me my fully charged battery is dead after about 20 minutes, but will continue (since I permit it ONLY to warn me, not go into standby or hibernate) to run for 2 hours with 0% battery. Now I know this machine does in fact have a weak battery; when new it would run happily for 4 hours on a charge, and APM problems were minor - about once every couple I would have to disable standby modes and let the machine run until it shut down and wouldn't start up again, and then my battery meter would be right on again. Leaving the unit plugged in with the battery installed causes most of this; the battery doesn't experience a normal charge/discharge cycle over a number of boots, and the OS learns an erroneous discharge curve. I know this - I find ways to work around it - but it IS a pain in the ass. I've found LINUX APM support to be utterly horrendous on this machine; it does in fact eat up the battery in an hour or less, but it doesn't give me erroneous battery readings - when it sez I have 5% battery, I go looking for the umbilical. A new battery would be a good idea, and I'd happily do it but for the fact of finding a retailer who sells them. But this machine appears to be the bastard child at ASUS (Yes - ASUS does in fact manufacture laptops - and aside from the battery issue, I've been pleased - I've done nothing but pound this auction-bought machine for 2 years and it still does everything I want it to) but I am at the point now of seriously considering buying a new battery pack for another machine just to rob the cells out of... anyhow - a few things I have learned... When you plug it in, remove the battery once it is fully charged. Once it becomes habit, you don't even notice, and it helps avoid all those APM/Cell Memory, etc issues. And your battery WILL have a much longer useful life. PERIOD. Use the frelling Battery once in a while. You don't have to use it every day, but using it, and depleting it down to the last few percent keeps it healthy. Running the machine until it shuts down completely will not hurt the battery. The power supply circuitry in the laptop itself will shut down long before the voltage on the battery gets low enough for cell inversion to be a problem. If you are getting what seems to be unusually short runtime, try turning off the standby and hibernate modes in your power management, then let the machine run on battery until it just plain dies.(Preferably doing something non-critical; it WILL crash and you don't want to damage files) then recharge the battery with the laptop turned off. I have found this method to work reasonably well at resetting the learning curve in '98,XP,and 2000 Pro. It seems to have no effect with LINUX. Sorry about the length of this reply... there just seemed to be a lot of points I wanted to get out there. Mnementh 15-year Veteran Electronics Tech & Personal Confuser Addict
Give all the flaky batteries to whatever group makes up the (in)famous RPI Drop Squad. They could station some of the IBM execs at the bottom of their favorite stairwell, and... well, read the web site. You'll get the idea. ;-)
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I work for a rather Large company, and Thousands of employees use these 600 series the E and the X. In the 2.5 yrs ive had mine the battery has been replaced 2x and they stopped really supporting giving you new ones, instead IT's solution is to buy you an extra power supply or two. For business trips it works.. but if it were a personal laptop i would be upset. They replace them on a 4 yr cycle so im already over the half way piont.. i only hope my replacement isnt the same way.. it will probably be the T-30 or the successor to that model.
You are right.
To summarize about Li-Ion
* no memory effect.
* degrade over time and will have about 30% less capacity every year.
* can be recharged from any point and the charging can be discontinued at any time.
* can be recharged thousands of times. Enough to keep you from thinking about cycle life time.
* NEVER store them uncharged. So when you have used your notebook on the flight. Recharge it on the destination as soon as possible.
*
I have a tinkpad that i got of ebay w/o a battery... i bought one brand new and it lasted about 4 months. I also worked on a buddies identical thinkpad 600 and his battery was shot... when i asked him about it he said "oh f**king batter went dead just after the waranty was up"... seems like a lot of people are having problems with the thinkpad 600 battery!
And after charging it I watched it run and once it hit 50% it dropped straight to 4% and the warnings all came on. Brand new bttery kasted about an hour with nothing running. R.
IBM has released a couple BIOS updates for the thinkpad that address this issue. My group had a few of these thinkpads and updating the BIOS seemed to help, although we didn't replace the batteries any more after that point so we didn't really get a clean test out of it.
Google also revealed a collaborative web page devoted to this issue, which I hadn't noticed until now:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/milnoc/TP600Battery/
It does a good job explaining symptoms, why it occurs, and how to tell if the BIOS problem is what's killing your battery prematurely.
-- Scott
Actually, the G4 and G3's support reduced speed for increased power (That's how they hit 5-6 hour battery life, it's more like 3 hours at full speed), in fact the Mac had this feature before the PC ever did (IIRC it was introduced in the '040 era).
And the P4 Mobile doesn't crunch data as fast as the P4 Desktop, even at top speed. It's not much slower (Unlike older mobile pentiums), but it is slower.
I agree with your last statement in full, but you miht be surprised how little of a penalty you pay going to a Radeom Mobility 9000 or GeForce 440 Go on a P4 Mobile or G4 based laptop. These days a low end laptop (With a Radeom Mobility and a Celeron 1.2GHz CPU) is a better gaming platform than the equivalent low-end PC (With the Celeron 1.8 or low end Athlon and crappy onboard graphics.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
At work, i am responsible for about 10 of the 600Es. All but one have had the battery die just after a year. You guessed it, the warrenty expires and the batteries follow.The real fun part arises when the BIOS us updated on the 600E because the BIOS update rquires a fully charged battery and will not complete even the 600E is plugged into the wall.
A few weeks ago, I wrote up a text for an online petition with a long list of reasons why we need an industry standard for laptop batteries [hanno.de], similar to consumber electronics battery cells.
This has been tried before. Several years back, Duracell developed a set of standard laptop batteries that they offered for license to laptop manufacturers and even competitors.
The industry yawned, with only Compaq really giving them a try, but abandoning the idea shortly after.
There's just *way* too much money in proprietary batteries for them to leave it on the table. The whole situation is sort of a Yugoslavia of disintegrating standards - it's just as bad as memory cards, where we have Compact Flash (the most open of the group), MultiMedia Card, SD Memory Cards, and the hideously proprietary Sony Memory Stick all making our portable digital devices totally incompatible with one another...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Yup. I went through 3 of them before I ditched the thinkpad altogether in favor of an inspiron.
I did have the exact same problem with mine. I've wondered if maybe even running linux on it made the difference(never ran windows on it, and i heard early linux support for power monitoring wasn't as good as windows) But that wouldn't kill the battery would it? Anyways, I've found that if you take out the battery whenever it's tethered, and only put it in when tethered to charge it, it lasted a lot longer.
Ansi's and stupid tricks!
1) The expiration of the battery to due simple calendar age.
2) The wear on the battery caused by the load pattern.
I never claimed that there was no fault by IBM. They could be drawing too much current from the battery, and forcing the cells into early voltage shutdown, or maybe equipped a low-end laptop with a crappy charging circuit. The link, written by someone much more knowledgeable than you or I, clearly describes acceptable and unacceptable usage conditions for Li-Ion cells in much more detail than the "Discharge the battery completely" and "Never use the battery" posts which I did read, and made up the majority of replies to this post.
You are welcome to contribute useful information as well. However, all you seem to offer is mockery and the inability to click on an informative link. Good day.
yes, it would be kind of messy wouldnt it.
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What you need to note it that it is the keyboard controller (KBC) bios, not the main CPU bios. There are differeent KBCs, but they are really little 16 bit RISC cores from different vendors. But as all PC laptops come from about 3 ODMS in Taiwan, I bet they are all pretty much identical
but the KBC runs straight off the EPROM; no ram shadowing. when you are doing laptop bios dev you make a custom rom by unsoldering the rom and putting a socket in, cutting out a hole in the base for access. To make a virus/rom that blew up laptops you'd need to include the code to write to the EPROM as part of the payload...easy to do under win9x, but harder under a real OS. With admin priveleges on NT you can reenable port IO from a a win32 app, so it is possible for a worm to do the work.
overall though, its a serious undertaking: the kind of things goverments can do especially if they get the C source from a PC vendor. But the idea of a dedicated virus that could destroy a laptop spectacularl, potentially injuring the user, is the kind of thing they might like.
If you want to -really- tune up your Linux system for power savings, read The Linux Battery-Powered Mini Howto. Using the methods presented in this howto, turning off my swap, and using console-based programs to do my work (such as vi) has increased my battery time from less than an hour to four and a half hours. When you cut the unneccessary crap and make sure that the hard drive is only on when neccessary, you can save a lot of power on laptops.
I have an IBM Thinkpad 350c 486/25 laptop with 8MB of ram, and the thing has not a battery problem, but a durability problem. Turns out the piece of shit was made by Lexmark, who IBM owned about a decade ago. I've had to replace the screen cover, and the floppy drive. I even had to fasten the hinge back on on the inside with LIQUID NAILS because the piece of shit broke off. They even GLUED the hinge on in the factory, and I know this because I've opened up two other 350c's. Also, my IBM Aptiva P-166 machine I got for free is built like shit too. IBM always takes the cowards way out, not to mention they rip you off. NEVER BUY FROM THEM!
I have had my original iBook SE since August 2000, and I still get more than 2.5 hours from the battery under Linux.
Why do [all, not just laptop] batteries die so easily?
Easy answer: because you aren't encouraged to look after your batteries.
How do I look after my laptop battery, I can't find anything in the manual?
NiCad: avoid at all costs giving your laptop a quick charge, a couple of these will dramatically reduce your battery lifetime.
NiMH: as above, but just try to avoid it, NiMH's can take a few more 5 min top-ups.
LiIon: avoid letting your battery go flat, LiIon's like charges when the battery is only partly charged (I could be wrong, I haven't done a lot in LiIon theory).
If you have NiCad or NiMH batteries, let them go as close as possible to flat as you can, then charge them to full, this is not always doable, and NiMH's are designed to take occasional abuse.
A lot of Apple laptops, running OS 9 or less had a program to revive the battery, not sure what it was called, but I have seen old PB 190cs's with the original battery, still working because the owner knew how to use this program, and used it reguarly. What it actually did, was while hooked up to AC, it would flatten the battery completely, then bring it to full charge, several times if necesary, and more often than not, it would bring the battery back up from dead too a significant percentage of it's original capacity (20 - 50%), or, if you had taken care to look after your battery, would keep it up around the 90% of original capacity.
I know this comment is a few days later than the article, so it you think others may benifit, spread the word, and keep your batteries for years!
VK3TST
-- "People aren't stupid. Usually." -- jd
I was thinking about this article, and I was wondering if fuel cells would be a good replacment to current battery technology in laptops.
Volunteer Mozilla developer, RPI Student.
When my old boss decided he wanted to buy/resell laptops, he had me doing the refurb and setup. I noticed several of his 600 series laptops were having problems maintaining a charge. One laptop in particular would list "BADBADBAD" in every field of the battery info window under Windows. After a long search, my friend found a site (URL unknown) that listed a likely cause of this as the DC to DC converter board that each battery connects to when inserted. A continued search found replacement converters at less than half of IBM's replacement part price. Upon swapping the new converter in, the battery worked flawlessly. As a trial, we placed the new converter into each of the other laptops, and were surprised that all but one began working properly.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.