[TriLUG] Ot: getting replacement batteries for old laptops

[Pat Regan]

Ed Hill wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-06-24 at 20:07 -0400, Pat Regan wrote:
>> 
>> I am mostly interested in this because I am lucky to break 5-6 hours of
>> light use out of the two batteries in my laptop, when I used to be able
>> to get 8+ hours out of it before I tightened up the power management.
>> New batteries are 100-120 a piece, and I would really prefer to pay less :).
> 
> Hi Pat,
> 
> There are a number of companies that sell external laptop batteries.
> Some have huge (relative to stock batteries) capacities.  And some come
> in convenient "planar" form factors that neatly fit underneath a laptop
> or even act as a dock-like unit that attaches to the bottom.
> 
> And I've heard of people getting 10--12+ hours of real work with
> external batteries connected to, for instance, IBM X-series ThinkPads.

I have looked at these, and I even looked at making your own.  They seem
much easier to make, assuming you can easily match the required input
voltage of your laptop.  I know I saw some decently sized 6 volt lead
acid batteries at Fry's one time for pretty cheap.  You could probably
make a brick of 3 to power an 18 volt laptop.

I am pretty sure my laptops power supply puts out 16 volts.  I am not
knowledgeable enough to know if 18 volts would be safe to use, and I
also would not know how to properly convert 18 volts to 16 :).  I also
have no idea what to use to charge them.  I saw batteries similar to
these at Fry's one time (I am not advocating this vendor, just the first
I found):

http://www.planetbattery.com/index.asp?dept=10&brand=8011&product=8021

I found a good bit of talk about this sort of thing on sites for the old
Toshiba Librettos.  They are pretty much just small UPS batteries.

The problem is my laptop is quite small (10.6" x 7" x 1.6"), and my bag
is equally small.  Carrying a power brick takes some of the fun out of
having a small laptop :).  The "planar" form factor guys tend to be
larger than my laptop :).

I hope this info is useful for somebody.  I remember seeing a review of
a flat external battery on Slashdot earlier this year, and I think it
cost nearly 400 bucks.  You could probably build one out of these for a
small fraction of that.

Pat
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