Thinkpads Forum

For what it's worth my experience is as follows.
I eBay'd two 4 cell batteries, one was IBM/Lenovo and the other generic. Needless to say this battery
works well, charges right up and fits like a glove (after the spacer is added that is).
The generic battery is a different beast altogether! It looks the same but it's a hard fit into the laptop
and the spacer doesn't line up as well as it does on the OEM battery.
Worse than that it doesn't want to charge and Lenovo's Power Manager disavows all knowledge
of this battery! It just gives some real basic info and tells me that this battery is not a genuine
Lenovo one.
Obviously some have had success with generic batteries, myself included, but on older Thinkpads.
Maybe along with the 2010 errors, IBM/Lenovo hard drive requirements and wireles requirements
batteries have to be original to work properly? Or maybe I just got a bad battery?

TIm S

The Lenovo battery/power management software checks to see if you are using a genuine Lenovo battery, and if not it will give you an exclamation mark besdie the power meter in the taskbar and a pop-up notice that your battery is not genuine. Also, as you note, there seems to be less information provided about generic non-genuine batteries. However, aside from those annoying things, I found that my generic batteries would still charge correctly and the amount of charge left would still be reported. If your generic battery is not charging then that is a fault in the battery, and I would try to return/replace it.

Just because it is reported as not a genuine Lenovo battery, does not mean that it is not charging. When my generic batteries stopped charging, I got actual battery errors, not just a note about them being non-genuine.

Phil.