Thinkpads Forum

Hello, I have these three old goats... and they run beautifully, but i'd like to see if it's possible at all to get working batteries for them.

From my understanding there's two ways you can go about getting a good battery. You can:
-Take apart a gimp battery and replace the flat cells with new cells, or insert Wal-Mart AA Rechargeables, solder them up to the chip, reassemble the battery
-Buy a NOS battery for really expensive
-wait for a secondhand one to crop up, or wait for a cheap unit that happens to have a good battery.

What do you think is the most reasonable/viable/fiscally sensible way?

If these are NiMH cells,t hen just change out the cells.

I would like to do the same to my 701c but I don't have battery at all so I would first need to find a battery.

I *barely* have a 701 battery case to work with. Unfortunately, it's one of those that exploded and corroded everywhere. I've been working on it for the past few days, but I'm not looking to spend a large amount of time shredding bits of old decayed battery chemicals off some old cells and a plastic case.

It is the one i'm mostly interested in getting going though. Gonna have to find some cells...!

I have successfully re-celled a 701c battery. If the PCB has not terribly corroded, it's a straightforward operation. Simply open up the casing, cut off the old cells, clean everything up, solder in new cells, and done.

I did manage to get at the PCB tonight. It doesn't look like it's damaged, although the nodes are peeling off. I suppose I can give it a shot.

It is kind of funny that you can still find old batteries that still work for those machines (I have a few of the 760/770 series ones that take a decent charge). I would like to try recelling an old 755 battery (Nimh) any good places for the cells, anything special you need to know?

I simply bought a set of AA cells with solder tabs on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/290535051997 The seller also has their own website if you prefer that. So far they seem to perform adequately.

For a while I contemplated using spring contacts and regular AA rechargeables, but eventually ditched that idea.

I thought I saw somewhere that using a different sort of cell, or using the standard AA rechargeables from a store would increase the battery's lifespan over a standard one. I recall this was a mod done to dramatically increase an X60's battery life to near netbook-class battery life. Which actually sounds like an appealing idea.

Although lengthy battery life isn't in my interest for these machines-I just want to be able to fetch them out at random times in class and freak everyone out.

Well, NiMH are pretty much drop-in replacement for NiCd, but an X60 would use Li-Ion cells, which are so different (and potentially dangerous) that I wouldn't even think about replacing with any other cells.

With regards to the discussion about recelling the old batteries, I have a question. Will the batteries in the eBay-link also work in a 770Z? I have a 770Z with a completely dead battery. The plastic case seems ok, hopefully the inside isn't corroded. Nothing to loose, since it's dead anyway, so I will try to open it up and put new cells in.

I don't know how long a battery life a recelled battery will give, but if it's enough for booting up and carrying the laptop between rooms, it's good enough for me. I assume these old dinosaurs didn't have the best battery life to begin with.

I happen to have a 770Z battery flat open, in case you need any more photos, just let me know
http://imgur.com/qbAHIpG

Thank you for the picture, interesting to see. Are you in the process of swapping these?

And has anyone actually changed the cells in a 770 battery like this? I see the different types of batteries mentioned here: NiMh, NiCd and Li-Ion. I will check later, but I think the label on my 770Z battery says Li-Ion. Are the two first ones older types of batteries, while Li-Ion is the newer and more effective one? And also the kind that is warned about working with?

Medessec: Did you ever succeed with the battery for the 770 mentioned in this topic?

It's been awhile since I posted this topic... I actually unfortunately haven't made any progress on the subject since then, not even on my 701 battery. I think the PCB was mad corroded, there was no way I would've salvaged it.

I do have two dead 770 battery casings... so I may have to give this a shot, but my current 770X isn't really a collector's piece, I kinda have it just to have a 770. So I can use it to test batteries... that's about it. I'm not sure I want to sink labor and money into making batteries for these things quite.

Norway Pad wrote:Thank you for the picture, interesting to see. Are you in the process of swapping these?

Not a prob.

Not really. I have a 770X with a working battery already and recently got a 770Z with the pictured battery that had a corroded casing and came off with no force at all. For reference purposes I take pictures of the guts of various electronics before I recycle them After all the 770 series are desktop bound laptops and not to be carried around a lot. I was contemplating to replace batteries for my 560X which indeed is ultraportable, but never got round that (yet)

In order to gain some experience before doing the Li-Ion battery, I decided to look into giving a go at the 360 battery. This has NiMH cells. So I opened it up, and it turned out to be 16 so called 4/5 1.2V cells in there. With the cheapest 4/5 batteries I found on eBay, the total for 16 new cells and shipping will be approximately $88. So not very cheap, and I have to put some more thoughts into this.