Battery on its last leg? + some other issues

[wkw]

Hello. I just got two thinkpads, an R51 and a 600x and have a few questions about them.

First of all, on the T51, the battery works. It holds a charge for 40-45 minutes while idle in the bios, and that is fairly consistent. However, when I boot it into windows 7 (fresh install), the battery would last about 10 minutes, go from 100-~85%, and then skip to 0 and windows puts it into hibernation.
The thing is, I can boot it back up, and leave it run for another half hour.. But the battery reads 0%

Are there any ways to recondition the battery so that I can get a proper reading? Or should I just suck it up and get anew battery for $20 on amazon?

Additionally, I might have to backgrade to windows xp, because the function keys don't do what they aught to.. For example, there is no way to turn off my wlan.


Now, about the 600x. The cmos was dead, so it wasn't very difficult to get a new battery and replace it. That works. However, the battery does not. There were three 600x's, and I pulled the cmos and batteries from all of them. Cmoses just because I didn't want to have one to screw up with. Batteries.. well, they don't hold a charge. At all. Period. I took one apart, and only one cell has any sort of reading on a multimeter at all.

Would that be worth it to get a new battery? As well as an urltraslim battery.. Though, If I would seriously have to consider using it, I would need to get a new hard drive. 6GB... Windows takes up 4.5.. Not able to do very much.

Thanks



Additionally, I just pulled a pci wireless card from an R60 with a broken screen. I couldn't get very much of the wire for the antena. Do you think it'll work in the 600x?

[dr_st]

The thing is, I can boot it back up, and leave it run for another half hour.. But the battery reads 0%

Are there any ways to recondition the battery so that I can get a proper reading? Or should I just suck it up and get anew battery for $20 on amazon?

This is a common symptom on batteries (esp. Sanyo, according to my experience). The battery degrades, but the gauge degrades even more, and consistently reports the battery being at 0% when there is actually quite a bit juice left. With two batteries in similar condition, I found that I could improve the accuracy a bit by recalibrating (a couple of full discharge-charge cycles), but not too much.

If it's important to you to get the last bit of juice out of the battery, disable the automatic hibernation feature by Windows. If it's important to you to not accidentally lose data when the computer turns off, then it's time for a new battery. In any case, it's probably a good idea, since according to your times the battery is very worn and lasts only for 45 minutes.

Additionally, I might have to backgrade to windows xp, because the function keys don't do what they aught to.. For example, there is no way to turn off my wlan

This is a matter of installing the correct software (hotkey utility + maybe wlan driver from Lenovo).

[RealBlackStuff]

R60 machines have MiniPCIe (e as in express) cards, they do not fit in your R51 nor in the 600x.
Those older machines require MiniPCI.

[wkw]

Thanks. I might just do another charge/discharge cycle on it to see whats up. Else I'm getting a new battery.

Alright. Ive found a thinkpad 760EL laying around.. And aside from the two memory modules, I can't figure out how to take it apart. There are only four screws on the rear of the machine.. But they don't seem to be doing anything to hold it on after removing them.

And, there aren't any screws on the bottom of the laptop.. At all. Short of sawing it in half I have no idea on how to disassemble it! anyone have some ideas, or better, pictures of what I need to unscrew to take it apart?
Thanks


-edit

Nevermind. Found what I needed to find online. In black and white, with really tiny pictures :S

Seems nothing I can use in there. 800mb hard drive, WOW!