New battery crashes windows [t43p] *PIC*

[Bibin]

I have an OEM battery in poor shape. I wanted to buy a new battery, so I took a chance on a $25 one from eBay, a non-OEM one that seemed alright.

It arrived very quickly. The build is almost identical, save for the copyright stickers. I popped it in.

The T43p boots up perfectly fine to the bios, and proceeds to load windows XP.

XP starts to come up, but then when the desktop loads (about 20 seconds in) it just 100% locks up. Mouse doesn't move, keyboard does nothing, all sound stops, no activity. No bluescreen. It is not the GPU nor the southbridge. The exact same procedure using my old OEM batteries doesn't do that.

It behaves this way on battery or with the power adapter plugged in (which is also OEM). What I have tried is booting with the OEM battery, then swapping to see what the ThinkPad Power Manager says about it. For the brief seconds that I got it to work this way I was able to see nothing clearly wrong with the new battery, so this is a mystery.

Here is a video documenting the strange behaviour (I do not know why it is rotated.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCdBPPJA5ek

Does anyone know a good place to buy a known functional battery?

[FTC]

Hi, just a guess but it may help. Have you tried to leave it charging overnight before attempting to power on the machine ? maybe it is way too discharged and this causes problems w/power management sw.... even if attempting to boot because connected to A/C.

[Bibin]

Hi, just a guess but it may help. Have you tried to leave it charging overnight before attempting to power on the machine ? maybe it is way too discharged and this causes problems w/power management sw.... even if attempting to boot because connected to A/C.

Yep, it was also full when I got it. I tried draining and filling it again to no avail.

[FTC]

Hi,

OK, does the thinkpad boot all right in SAFE MODE with the new battery? If it also hangs I would then not spend any more time and return the battery..

[Bibin]

No, it doesn't - same crash. Sometimes it crashes on the boot screen, with the bar going across - it just stops.

[Bibin]

I confirmed the same results running Windows 7.

[ajkula66]

Be on the lookout for Lenovo Outlet offerings. Nothing right now for T4x/R5x, but they do pop up every now and then...

My advice would be to run the T43p without the battery (or with a good weak battery) until you get a proper one, so the charging circuit on the planar doesn't get damaged.

[Bibin]

I have a ~50% capacity battery I've been using.

This new battery hasn't been in the thinkpad much at all because it's unusable, so it's just sitting on my desk. I'm fairly sure the cells inside it are fine, however. I might attempt to transplant them into an OEM battery with the good charging circuitry.

I did manage to get it to show up in the power manager before it froze:

This image is < 50k.

[RealBlackStuff]

Before you go transplanting, be aware that the electronics circuit INSIDE the battery must remain under power at all times!
If you interrupt/disconnect power, you can kiss your battery goodbye!