R51 Battery Not Charging

[kenfarquhar]

Hi - First post!
My Thinkpad R51 battery stopped working recently after about a month of no use. I've tried a replacement AC charger and replacement battery but the batteries wont charge in any combination of battery and charger. Laptop works fine with no battery from AC adaptor only. Checked batteries with a voltmeter and the 1st one is about 0 volts so is probably dead! 2nd one reads 12.5volts so seems OK.
Only other suggestion the IBM hardware ref manual has is replace the system board - but I'd be probably better off just getting another laptop
Is there a separate DC converter off the system board or is there anything else between the yellow jack to the motherboard / battery charging input?
Grateful for any help.
Cheers

[Neil]

Welcome to the forum!!

There are some fuses on the motherboard that protect the charging circuit. There are several threads on the forum about them. A few folks have successfully found and "piggy-backed" a new fuse over the blown one. IMHO, they are too tiny to even consider working with. I've tried a few times, but never successfully.

If you consider your time as worth anything, replacing the whole system board would cost less than $50 and take about a hour. Replacing a fuse would cost $?? for the fuse, and, at least for me, hours of frustration and failure.

But, on the bright side...it is a pretty good excuse for a new (or newer) ThinkPad! Plus you might be able to sell off a few of the parts to raise a little cash.

[kenfarquhar]

Neil
Thanks for the quick response. I'll maybe take the case apart and see if there's anything obvious. But your replace/resell option might be the best option. Did similar thing with my daughter's Fujitsu Amilo (are we allowed to say these words on this forum! ( ) and I did get back most of the outlay for the other laptop.

I did have a quick look for an R51 board on ebay (UK) but nothing come up.

On the other hand I only use this machine to control my music / media server in the living room so could probably get by with just using it on AC charger all the time.

Thanks again.

(Great forum so far!)

[RealBlackStuff]

For $70.- I could ship you a perfectly good working R51 motherboard with professionally reballed GPU (32MB ATI 7500).
Comes with 90 day written warranty.
PM me if interested.