X31 battery issues

[oniichan]

Hi. First time poster, long time lurker.

I pretty recently recieved a near-mint condition X31 as a gift. The battery is from 2003, but has only a mere 70 cycles. It's the Lithium-Ion version, as I understood there's other chem batteries out there.
Now, I'm not exactly a Windows user. In all OSes I tried, the battery reports via ACPI that it is fully charged, and about two hours remaining. That's fine by me to be honest. The problem is the unpredictable behaviour when approaching 0% - or rather, the fact that the laptop can keep running for 40 minutes while on "Discharging: 0%, remaining" (No actual remaining time printed, and 0%).

On my T61p I performed a battery gauge reset in order to get some more linear readings. I just can't find this option on the x31 though. I installed tons of various versions of the Access IBM centres and various Lenovo AND IBM power managment tools - nothing. The Battery MaxiMiser or however they spell it does not offer this feature, at least not that I can find, and the Lenovo Power Manager gets close to what I saw on the T61p, but I can't spot any reset function what so ever.

Screenshot attached as a hotlink, I hope this doesn't violate the rules, but it's 550k in size.
http://a.pomf.se/lsvoep.PNG

I'm grateful for any help - the problem isn't the low charge, but the fact that it stays at 0% for much longer, leaving me clueless of any actual values.

[dr_st]

Hello, oniichan, and welcome to the forum.

Unfortunately, as the batteries get older and degrade, their gauges degrade also. Recalibrating the battery by fully discharging/charging it a few times may help, but not always and not 100%.

However, if you do wish to try - there is no need for a special feature like "gauge reset". All it does is exactly what I mentioned above anyways. You may do so manually, simply by disabling any automatic standby/shutdown events on low battery, and letting it idle at 0% for as long as it wants.

[oniichan]

Oh? Okay. It's discharging now, I'll do a couple of real cycles and report back.

Also, another question too small for a thread of its own. Is there a good replacement battery available over Ebay? I've had very bad luck with replacement batteries.
I also understood that using a SSD will increase battery life - is there a good one available? Will it impact battery life noticeably?