Thinkpad T60 battery lockup/slowdown problem.

[Roger-H]

I recently acquired the following off of Craigslist:

T60 2623-KEU
Centrino Duo
3 GB RAM
80 GB HD
ATI graphics
Intel a/b/g wireless (I think)

It was cheap because the owner said he was having problems with it locking up. He even did a clean install of Windows XP on it from the recovery disks, but had no luck. He showed me how it would lock up on the Windows boot screen sometimes, other times it would get all the way to the desktop before locking. I figured I'd take a stab at rehabbing the machine.

Checked the BIOS, it was up to date and reset everything to defaults. The battery was shot, showed no signs of charging and the indicator light continually blinked orange. After a little bit of Googling, I found that there was an issue on some T60s where a bad battery would cause them to lock up. I removed the battery and did some tests on AC power only. After two days of use, not one lockup. I wiped Windows off the machine and replaced with my favorite Linux distro (Crunchbang). Running on AC, it's fantastic.

I have an R500 around with the original, Lenovo-brand, factory-installed battery in it. I figured I'd try it out in the T60. When the R500 battery is in the T60 and it's plugged into AC, it seems a little slower than when it runs with no battery at all, but when I remove it from AC, it slows down to the point where it is unusable. I did some more Googling but didn't find anything concrete regarding this specific behavior.

Any ideas? I'd understand if it did this with an off-market battery but that's not the case. It's a great machine, I'd like to fix it up. Thanks in advance for any advice.

[RealBlackStuff]

Your machine came like this ex-factory:
T60 (2623-KEU), Core 2 Duo T5600 1.83GHz, 1GB RAM, 14.1" SXGA+, ATI X1300 64MB graphics, 80GB 5400 HD, DVD±RW, Intel 11a/b/g wifi, Bluetooth
Batteries for T60 and R500 (and many others) are the same, but there are several different manufacturers, Panasonic making the best batteries.

Your current battery problems may come from having no IBM/Lenovo power management.
Or maybe your Linux version is too old, or not T60-suited?

[Roger-H]

Thanks for the specs.

The manufacturer for my R500 battery is Lenovo, but when I buy another one I'll shoot for Panasonic, thanks for that advice.

CrunchBang is based on the latest stable version of Debian (Wheezy), so I figure the kernel should have everything in it to manage power on a six year old Thinkpad. The laptop-mode-tools package that I normally install with Ubuntu isn't available, I wonder if that would make a difference.

[Roger-H]

Correction, I do have laptop-mode-tools installed, not sure why I didn't think I did.