So my dinky default (6-cell I believe, maybe 4-cell) battery that came with my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 has been giving out on me. I believe my problem was I never flexed the battery when I first got it and now I was only getting about an hours worth of work out of my laptop.
While I didn’t have super high expectations of battery life out of my 15″ laptop, I did specifically get the Intel graphics adapter to shave off my power draw and did everything available to reduce power (Intel speed step turned to power saving, turning down the backlight, increasing writeback time, turning on laptop_mode, disabling the bluetooth radio, disabling compiz, etc.), I was still getting an abysmal battery life out of my laptop (it wouldn’t even last through a single class).
Well i finally got tired of it, walked down the street to the batteries plus, and got myself the ‘off brand’ Rayovac Extended Capacity battery for the T60 (which is almost exactly the same as the T61).
All I can say is I’m so happy I’m getting 4+ hours out of my laptop now and I don’t even have to disable compiz or do excessive tuning! The battery jutting out of the back of the laptop (as you can see in this image, with thanks to notebookcheck.net and Google image search for the image) doesn’t bother me at all, and in fact it provides a nice grip for when I’m holding the laptop up and walking around.
Hopefully now I’ll be able to get more work done on my laptop and not be tied to a wall outlet (which defeats the purpose of a laptop in the first place)…
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