Thinkpads Forum

I've got 2 completely dead batteries for the 600X, so I've been thinking of getting one of the 4400mah batteries offered by various vendors. What kind of battery life are people getting with these? The only quote a search turned up was 2.5 hours, which seems low...

The OEM 4400mah battery I bought off of eBay last year can give anywhere between 2 and 3 hours of life but on average, it's about 2.5 for me.

I am evaluating three batteries I received from batteryrefill.com on my 600X systems. These are re-celled IBM packs with 4400mAh capacity. After going through the recommended discharge-charge cycles I am getting about the 2.5 hours you quoted. This is with the laptop in constant use (i.e. the LCD backlight always on), running Firefox with a MiniPCI 802.11b/g wireless card. The only thing I have in Windows 2000 power settings is to power down the disk drive after 3 minutes. During a session last night, the disk did go into the low power mode only a few times, so I would say that the usage was somewhere around 90-95%. I have not tried anything less power intensive like typing up a document and letting the display timer engage.

I had ordered a battery from them for my daughter's laptop about a year ago but since she uses it plugged in all the time I don't know what kind of life she is getting. I do know that she is not complaining about her battery like she did before. Of the three that I have now, I only have solid data on one pack.

The only complaint I have about these batteries is that they are not re-assembled too cleanly. They appear to have been glued back together and on all three of them the corner near the positive terminal is loose (not glued). Reading customer feedback about their experiences with the company is both very positive and very negative. Mostly the problems are poor communication and slow delivery times. I chose to use the exchange program where you order the batteries, they ship the re-celled packs to you along with a pre-paid, pre-addressed label. You then send them your near-dead or dead batteries so they can re-cell them and sell them to someone else. I believe that it took about 10 days for me to receive my order.

Hope this information is useful to you. I know that there are several eBay sellers offering 4400mAh batteries (at a slightly higher price than batteryrefill.com). Maybe someone else here has purchased batteries from them and can tell you (us) what they think of them.

(edit: geezzz... beaten by AK by 3 minutes...)

A few months ago I bought a new generic no name 4400mah battery off of ebay..I also get about 2.5 hrs of battery life...It's almost all wireless internet surfing,I very happy with it..Costs was around $45 including shipping...

Thanks for the replies everyone. I was expecting the new batteries to at least give me another half hour.

A note about another post that just came up and that I'd thought I'd post this to this thread as well since it may apply...

I ran MobileMeter on my 500Mhz 600X last night and it reports ~250Mhz when running battery only and 500Mhz when plugged in with the AC adapter. Battery pack is a re-celled IBM original. Running Win2K Pro SP4. Don't know what to make of this yet. If anyone can explain why processor speed steps down and where I can change it so it doesn't, please post in this thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=26839

Thanks!

I've also got one of the 4400mah batteries, and I get a little less than 3 hours off it with normal use.

One obvious tip: if you are running on battery power and not connected to the internet turn off any background process that you won't need like firewall, anti-spyware, or anti-virus, and remove any pc cards you won't be using.

If you are running Norton Anti-virus, however, even when turned off your battery life will suffer, as NAV is really a resource hog. The most efficient anti-virus is from Trend Micro, which is also the anti-virus in V-COM's SystemSuite (I use SystemSuite 6). My 600X is noticable faster with SS6 as opposed to NAV. Maybe that's why my battery life is better, too!

Bill.

I bought a 4400mah battery from ebay seller sib-usa and have had no issues. I get close to three hours on a full charge. The overall quality seems to be very good, and the price is decent too.

I got an generic battery on ebay from the seller mardext it is the only with 5000mAh that i could find and it last 3hrs 15mins with the wireless on, the cpu set to 500mhz and the backlight set to the lowest.

It's great!

rkawakami wrote:A note about another post that just came up and that I'd thought I'd post this to this thread as well since it may apply...

I ran MobileMeter on my 500Mhz 600X last night and it reports ~250Mhz when running battery only and 500Mhz when plugged in with the AC adapter. Battery pack is a re-celled IBM original. Running Win2K Pro SP4. Don't know what to make of this yet. If anyone can explain why processor speed steps down and where I can change it so it doesn't, please post in this thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=26839

Thanks!

in win xp pro anyway if you set power settings to desktop ,always on or high system performance it will run 500 always
+guess what?your battery run time will be almost he same running full speed,you can then adjust hdd /monitor shut off accordingly
if this don't work run ibm power features.set cpu to max performance for battery
with 650 cpu you can adjust for 650,500 or 250 mghz
in battery mode
if its on 650 and battery gets low it automaticly switches to 500
or 250 depending on how i set up cpu in power managment.

cmarti wrote:I got an generic battery on ebay from the seller mardext it is the only with 5000mAh that i could find and it last 3hrs 15mins with the wireless on, the cpu set to 500mhz and the backlight set to the lowest.

It's great!

thats a far cry from current model thinkpads that can only manage
50-65 minutes on wifi always on with decent cpu speed and typical oem battery.so much for centrino tech hype.
any one can muster 4-6hrs + on battery if their laptop suspends
conversely 195 minutes is awsome for wifi running on a single battery.
must get me one of them