T42 replacement battery recommendations?

[snabjab]

I'm trying to squeeze another 8-10 months out of my T42 and I'm wondering if anyone has advice on how to choose a replacement battery. I assume that replacements from Lenovo will be prohibitively expensive. I got a third party battery off eBay last year and it never got much more than 2 hours per charge and it deteriorated rapidly over the next few months. Are there respectable third party battery options available?

Many thanks in advance.

[Norway Pad]

New ones from Lenovo are listed for $159.

I looked into this a couple of weeks ago, and ended up buying a battery from a person here on the forum. Several users here claims to have only bad experiences with third party batteries, like you do. See this thread for further explanations: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=84041

[dataBoy]

I've often wondered if this replacement technique would work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtqRvAu71Gw

[poshgeordie]

I've often wondered if this replacement technique would work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtqRvAu71Gw

I've tried cell replacement on T4x's, both the 6 cell 4400mAh, and the 9 cell 6600mAh versions.

I consider myself to be a very competent solderer, and believe you me it's not only difficult but potentially very dangerous indeed. This is because if you short the cell even for a few milliseconds, that cell will V rapidly heat up and could go up in flames.

Also there's a circuit board fitted which passes the state of the battery, number of charge cycles etc to the laptop, and this should be reset using a programmer.

Because of these reasons I decided it was not worth the hassle and was in fact cheaper to buy decent quality replacement ones (for UK and European customers only).