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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.
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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"
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,
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 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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...)
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You may like my a cappella music
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 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.
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.