swapping switching battery whilst connected AC power

[popjoe]

Hi all

I bought a second battery for my X24 because the original lasts about an hour.

Just wondering is it necessary to shutdown the ThinkPad in order to swap the batteries over, or is it possible to find an AC power source, plug in the laptop, then swap batteries over (without downtime) ?

Or does the laptop trickle off the battery, with the AC just constantly topping up the battery, so this would be impossible to accomplish?

Thanks

[Xavier]

You can totally change your battery when your system is plugged in. Though, you must keep in mind that your battery acts as a UPS: if the electric network happens to fail, even for 1 second, while you are switching, your laptop will experience a hard shut down

It is not very likely to happen, but if you have important files that are open, it might be more secure to hibernate: it will ony slow you down by 20 seconds.

[popjoe]

I am new to the world of laptops!

I didn't know about this hibernation process. Google has revealed more...

So with Hiberation, the laptop saves everything that's open, shuts down power completely - leaving me safe to switch over the battery - but doesn't completely turn it off so that when I apply power, the laptop will come back to life quicker than booting up?

[DarkMark]

Well it does completely turn off, but saves the state of your computer to the harddrive which's memory is not affected by the power cutoff.

And yes in most cases returning from hibernation results in a considerable speed up compared to a normal boot up.

[popjoe]

Thank you DarkMark and Xavier!