by kamranjon 1 day ago

"I’ve opted for the largest after-market external battery I could find. When doing casual work the laptop will easily survive for north of 10 hours without a charge, stretching to 12 hours if I’m careful."

Does anyone have a good suggestion for an aftermarket battery? I have a few Thinkpads and I've tried so many batteries and they all last maybe 2 or 3 hours before needing a recharge. If someone is out there making high density batteries for these old laptops I'd love to pick one up.

jwrallie 18 hours ago

I’m also on the look for one for my x220.

I’m pretty sure any original looking battery at this point is either fake or stored for so long it does not make sense to buy one.

Last time I almost bought a KingSener, but it’s really hard to find long term reviews on batteries.

It depends on the model, but usually people claiming long stretches are on low brightness, Bluetooth off, CPU undervolt and using something like TLP.

gnopgnip 1 day ago

Since 2020 t14/t16 thinkpads no longer have a user swappable battery without removing screws. So you can get a 50wh standard battery or 82wh. Before 2020 you could get a slightly larger 96wh battery with a bump out, plus the small internal battery.

A power bank with a usb-c 65w pd will work for most laptops. Many of these will be 100wh/20000mah or 150wh/30000mah, to meet airplane limits.

brendoelfrendo 1 day ago

I use a T480 as my daily driver and recently upgraded to a 72wh battery after the old 24wh pack died. I bought a Lenovo-branded Total Micro battery off of CDW to ensure I was actually getting what I paid for, as the last battery was a cheap knockoff that barely lasted a year. The 72wh battery was about a $10 difference to the 48wh battery and will easily last 10 hours but could last 14 hours with conservative use.

This is the specific battery I bought: https://www.cdw.com/product/total-micro-battery-lenovo-think...

  • josteink 1 day ago

    Same here. A T480 as my personal laptop. 4 core/8 thread i7 CPU, 24GB ram and 512GB NVMe.

    Works for all my daily tasks, and light development. Feels nice and responsive.

    I’m running arch Linux and my custom hyprland-fork, which I’m using for a more retro look and a little bit more mouse-affordances than Hyprland wants to provide.

    Couldn’t be happier!