Thinkpads Forum

Hi and thanks a lot for helping me with my last issue. I'm a commuting college student who hates the lengthy train commutes back and to school. I was thinking about buying a battery for my TP 600 since it was given to me without one. Then I would be able to use it during my hour and a half train commute.

Taking into consideration that I wouldn’t be using the laptop prior to riding the train, would the battery last the whole hour and a half train commute? Are there batteries of different quality that differ in battery life? If so, can you recommend one?

By the way, I have a “ThinkPad 600”. Not a 600e or 600x.

Thanks so much for the guidance.

Wireless card working out okay, then?

A standard 600-series battery should run your system for about two hours, depending upon how much the hard drive is spinning, whether or not you are also using the optical drive and how bright you are turning up the screen. All of those things will drain the battery faster. I believe that the original capacity of the 600 batteries were 3200mAh. There are now places which refurbish older battery packs with new cells or sell "high-capacity" versions on eBay and elsewhere online. My normal recommendation is to stick with original IBM batteries, but as these are getting fairly old, you will probably have a hard time finding them new. I have purchased a couple of re-filled packs and they are operating fine but look like Frankenstein creations since the pack has been glued back together after the cells have been replaced. Can't remember at the moment what MobileMeter reported as the full charge capacity; batteryrefill.com says it's 4400mAh. If I find one around here later, I'll edit this post.

I recently purchased several 5000mAh batteries from an eBay seller. The packs are NOT genuine IBM batteries but appear to work fine in my systems. The full charge capacity is listed as 3500mAh (as read by MobileMeter), which is just a little bit more than original, but nowhere near 5000. I'm assuming that the smart chip inside the battery pack is reporting the truth. Either way, the packs run for two hours in a PC Doctor battery rundown test on my 600X. This test is designed to drain the battery much faster than "normal" use since the processor, hard drive and optical drive are constantly operating. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a PC Doctor version for the 600 system.

ref: http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValle ... mm0310.zip (MobileMeter)
ref: http://www.batteryrefill.com/laptops/ib ... 00_d.phtml
ref: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0154309423

The wireless card is working great. Looks like I'll be purchasing a battery form the ebay seller you've mentioned. I may also look into buying a new HD soon. This one is seriously limiting in its size. However, my financial status says otherwise.

Again, thanks for the informative and speedy replies.

Moderator edit: Removed entire quote to save space