ThinkPad X40 SSD conversion and battery woes
Posted by George Wright Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:03:00 GMT
My CF card and CF-IDE converter board arrived in the post and so today I started trying to get Linux installed on it.
At first I thought I’d try installing from a USB CD drive, but this was a horrendous mess and ended up wasting a good 8 hours of my life. In the end, I dumped the CF in a USB reader and debootstrapped hardy on, then booted it and installed kubuntu-desktop.
The installation is still going, but I did have a chance to run a quick hdparm -Tt on the disk; seems it’s doing a fairly consistent 25MB/s which is excellent given the old disk only did 18MB/s or so. hdparm also tells me that the disk is in UDMA-2 mode which is not too shoddy.
In other news, I’ve noticed that the batteries on my X40 are clapped out after nearly 3 years of abuse. The main 8-cell I have is down from 61Wh to 35Wh, and my extended battery which clips on the bottom is down from 27Wh to 12Wh. I can handle paying £30 to get a new 6-cell, as that’ll give a good 8 hours or so of life, but extended life batteries for the X40 are very seldom seen on eBay and the ones which do end up on there go for silly prices.
Does anyone have any experience replacing the cells in a ThinkPad battery manually? I just ripped my extended battery apart (luckily I had the correct triangular screwdriver bit…) and the four cells inside there are shaped in exactly the same way as in the normal 4-cell battery, which leads me to believe they share identical cells. My theory is that I can buy a normal 4-cell on eBay then rip the cells out of it then put them in the extended life battery. The only problem I can see at the moment is that ACPI reports design capacity and last known capacity, and I don’t know how to flush these values for recalibration. I’m assuming the charging circuit should be clever enough to work it out for itself?
I’d appreciate any comments or suggestions.
With my old thinkpad, I found that when it got confused about what its charge was, completely running it down and charging it up again seemed to fix the problem.
And your blog doesn’t like scripting being disabled for comments. Good job I’m not a habitual elinks user any more…
Just putting http://gimel.esc.cam.ac.uk/james/resources/tp240bat/ in here for reference.
You can try putting the batteries in the freezer for about a week (drain them first). It’s something I once read on hackaday.com. I did it with the battery of my p120 lappy and it resulted in battery life from about nothing to about an hour, with just one try. A few discharge/charge cycles sometimes may improve battery life too. If you want to know if the batteries are really empty, watch the voltage. Last but not least… If you want to replace the cells you have to make sure to get similar cells. You might be able to get identical cells, just search for the numbers that are on the cells, sometimes they only cost like EUR 3 / cell. Hope this is somewhat useful :)
What brand/size of CF->IDE adapter?
It was a no-name brand on eBay but it says CF-IDE44 v.H0 on it.
Size is just small enough to fit inside the 1.8” bay with a CF card in it.. It’s great.
For what it’s worth, I’ve now got the machine down to 7W with 6h08m estimated time remaining (brightness down, bluetooth off, wireless off). That’s not bad for a machine that’s got over half the battery life gone…
It would be great if you could write up your experience in a howto with instructions on what to buy and how to install and a price estimate. That might just convince me to try something like this before i can just buy ssd/flash in a 2.5” hdd formfactor.
I found this article. It’s not thinkpad-specific, but it should be a good starting point.
Which CF-card did you get? A lot of CF-cards don’t really support DMA it seems..
I bought a Son extended capacity battery there, which I could not find anywhere else at an acceptable price.
http://www.mdsbattery.co.uk/
AFAIK, LIon battery packs have a circuit board inside which does things like count the number of charges and perhaps monitor each cell. At some point, that board refuses to charge at all. Replacing the cells will probably not reset the logic.
The results of the article in comment #8 support this.
Well done finding an appropriate adaptor on ebay. I’ve tried a few times and totally failed. It seems either ZIF or ipod classic (male IDE connector on the adaptor) dominate.
Ignore the freezer advice! That is for old NiCd cells (NiMH too?) not Li-Ion.
This guy had success replacing the cells of an X31: http://www.summet.com/blog/2007/02/17/laptop-battery-refill/3/
Jon: the X40 HDD uses the same connector as standard 2.5” drives, no?