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Comment by paride5745 | Hacker News Reader

While I love those old Thinkpads (and I have one), my main issue with these posts is that nobody talks about battery life.

If I work on a laptop, I don't want to have to look for a power socket around, I need something to work on battery for at least half day.

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My x120 still gets more than 6 hours on its original 9-cell battery. Sway works great on it -- heavyweight DEs long since became unusable. The only problem it's developed is that if I pick it up by the bottom of the keyboard, it locks up. Some loose internal wiring, no doubt. Have to remember to pick it up by the hinge end.

This is one of the users for whom I optimize my software, folks :)

Thank you!

I generally upgrade when the battery can't keep up any more (or the damn thing falls apart, like my old X201). My 1st gen Thinkpad X1 was put out to pasture when the battery would only last about 2 hours and the (proprietary) ssd started going bad. Upgraded to a T460 with an i5 and love it. The hot-swappable battery is great in my book, although I don't understand why they don't have a separate charging dock for them.

The battery is hot swappable? Meaning the laptop stays powered on while you change the battery out? That is cool.

Yes. Many ThinkPads had a small internal battery to power it when you were swapping the main battery.

That is awesome, I had no idea. Dumb question, do you know what the feature is called, just hot-swappable capable or something for when Im shopping?

“ThinkPad Internal Battery” works on Google.

Heh - my TRS-80 Model 100 has that feature:

A small NiCad (though I'll be swapping it with a newer super capacitor soon) keeps the memory contents available when you swap out the four AA batteries if they run low (you get several days of runtime off them).

When it comes to battery, no one talks about performance. If I yank the power cable, my battery lasts maybe 1-2 hours, but the performance is 1/2 or even less. So I just avoid it.

x220 with ips screen, 9 cell battery. Lasts 9 hours if you just ssh. You can get it for $300-$400.

Yes, but that machine is quite a whole lot newer than an old X200. It's from 2012, X200 is from 2008.

Leveno sells new original batteries for old thinkpads. I have a x230 with a new battery and it lasts >8 hours.

You can also get NOS batteries on eBay for virtually nothing. Recently got a 68+ for my T440 for £39 delivered.

Be careful though as anything over 4 years old can be DOA as the batteries slowly discharge and the BMS in the battery itself disconnects them permanently for safety. This applies to ones Lenovo sell as well. I found this out when I bought the above but the seller sent another one out FOC. I dismantled the dead one, pulled the 18650s out and charged them up standalone and they were fine. Free cells!

The big problem with NOS battery is that sometimes its a gamble! I bought one off eBay for my x230 and I had to change it.

But the seller was cool enough to change it ( getting 4-5 hours ) and a smaller one which gets me around 2 hours more.

Yes it is a gamble but as I said, it is from Lenovo as well. The battery manufacturing date I got from a "new" one was 4 years old once.

I do have a similar experience. However, when I start compiling, the battery goes down in 2-3 hours. Simply because the compilation takes so much time...

I do that stuff on AWS. I try and treat my laptop as a terminal.

Oooh, I like that idea! I'm gonna try to figure that out today.

Or if you have some spare basement space, pick up an old Dell PowerEdge or some HP equivalent from eBay and slap ESXi on it. Works well for me, and I use my PowerEdge T410 for some other home services. 12 cores, 24 threads and 64GB DDR3 ECC RAM goes a pretty long way.

Plus keeps your house warm in the winter :)

If you’re an Emacs user, TRAMP makes running compilers on an external system feel almost completely transparent. New shells automatically open up on the remote machine and it feels almost local if your network latency is low enough.

How much is that AWS instance?

I fire up a suitable instance when I need it rather than leave one running. I have an AMI ready to roll with tools on it.

Average about $7-25 a month depending on what I’m doing.

I use a 9-cell battery on my X200, and it holds for around 4~5 hours. So for me it's perfectly fine.

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