Pic Dude wrote:
>
> Between my 2 main batteries, and 1 aux battery, I used to get over
> 8 total hours of laptop usage, but that's down to less than 1 hour
> nowadays, as the battery life is fading.  I once invested some time
> in manually fully discharging and fully recharging one battery about
> 5 times, and it pick up a lot of life, but again it's fading.  Used to do
> that with model airplane nicads, but it apparently worked for these
> Li-Ion's.
>
> Discharging involved leaving the laptop on until it warns of battery
> failure and then puts itself to sleep, then I'd re-awaken it and let
> it drain some more.  At some point, it just died.  Then I would put
> it back to charge fully.  Needless to say, I didn't like letting the OS
> die un-gracefully.
>
> There's got to be a better way -- is there some form of battery
> cycler that I can purchase or build that will work for these (IBM
> Thinkpad 600x) batteries?

I have the same problem, in fact lots of people with a Thinkpad 600 have the
same problem. The packs are just bad and unless the machine is still under
warranty IBM doesn't care. You can find refurbished batteries on ebay for about
half price (around US$100), but even they die eventually.

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