Source for battery replacements?

aisle9 · July 9, 2023

I have a Lenovo X61 tablet PC, which is old enough to drive in most US states at this point. I love it to hell and will not give it up, to the point that I just bought a 4GB DDR2 SODIMM off of eBay to give it a little more wiggle room in Windows 10 (which worked perfectly). Thing is, I have two batteries for it. One's a compact placeholder for when I'm using it plugged in, 2000 mAh and totally flatline dead. It doesn't hold a charge whatsoever, just instantly dies. The other is a 5200 mAh battery that lasts about 3 hours and has held up surprisingly well.

You get where this is going. I've been using that 5200 mAh battery since 2017-ish. It's a third-party Chinese replacement battery (they both are). At some point, it's going to do what all Chinese replacement batteries do and just stop working. I keep it around 40-50% charged when it's being stored, but there will come a day when it becomes a placeholder like the low-profile battery is, and my options for replacing it are not great. $90-160 for any replacement X61T battery. I'm sure most of what's left out there was produced 5-10 years ago and probably won't ship to me in perfect condition. Is there a better source for replacement batteries out there than eBay/Newegg/Amazon? No question it's going to be a third-party battery, because the X61T is ancient and was a niche product/poor seller to begin with, just ideally not $90 for a battery that might flatline 60 days after getting it (lookin' at you, low-profile).

manikyath · July 9, 2023

you could look into the possibility of swapping the cells out, especially from that era the first party BMS'es are just fine with swapping cells. the chinese knockoffs can be tricky with reading charge level after a swap, or in worst case just outright refuse to charge.

also, battery technology made leaps in the last decade, so even if you have to settle for cells that are physically smaller it might be possible to have the same or bigger capacity.