Thinkpads Forum

My ThinkPad 701C spent a long time on the shelf without being touched - and when I took it out last night, I found that the battery had corroded badly. It took a lot of sweat and worry to get it out of the bay without damaging the machine.

Two questions for 701 experts:

1. Is there any reliable source of third-party batteries for the 701? I'm not sure it's worth the money, but I'd like to consider it?

2. If I don't use a battery, I'd rather have something capping the battery bay than leave it open. I salvaged the cap of the corroded battery - is there any easy way to turn this into a filler for the battery opening?

Thanks for any help with these.

My battery leaked as well, all I did was use clear packing tape and taped around it and stuck it back in. The old battery barely sticks out a little since I taped over the contacts. The battery itself didnt look that bad, but it left a bunch of crud inside on the contacts and the modem card.

I hope you stripped the machine and cleaned all the crud out of it before it breaks something important.

You can find batteries for $50 or so plus shipping online, but if you don't use the unit as a laptop I would not bother.

Good advice - thank you. Fortunately, all the corrosion on my unit was at the top of the battery (the end with the plastic cap, the opposite end from the contacts), and so no electronics in the machine were vulnerable. The corrosion didn't move into into the hard drive bay (I checked it and washed it to be safe) and it was easy to wash the corrosion off from the base of the keyboard and the outer case. I can understand that corrosion at the contacts end would have been a lot more difficult to deal with!

I don't recall what online vendor I bought from, but I picked up a replacement 701 battery on the web a couple of years ago and have done well with it. Check out ebay, also. You never know when you might want to use the machine without the A/C adapter.

See my postings in this thread: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=81514