thinkpad 600e problems

[exodus454]

Does anyone know how to solve the problem of a battery not charging other then buying a new battery? any tips or tricks? the battery light keeps flashing and when you take the battery out and put it back in, the charge light will og back to solid for 2 seconds, then start flashing again, and it will hold zero charge.

Also - IBM says to update the BIOS, you need a floppy drive, which I dont have. does anyone know a way around this?

And how much memory does it support? some sources ive found says two sticks of 128, others say two sticks of 256, and others say only one stick of 128, and one of 64.

can anyone help me out with this? its an IBM thinkpad 600e built in december of 99.

 

[voodle]

If the 600E has an older BIOS, it's possible that the battery will need to be replaced first.
I don't know how you could flash the bios without a floppy drive. Nero can possibly do emulation for that, but you need a fully charged battery to do that, which means you'll have to get one first, and then there's the possibility that the charging circuit on your laptop may have stopped working, but you'll find out if/when you get the new battery since you can't really do much of anything with your current one.

On the memory front, it can take up to 588 megs of ram, two 256 meg pc100/pc66 sodimms, they MUST have 8 chips per side, or in other words, low density or it won't work. Although some have reported problems with various configurations, so you will probably want to have the latest BIOS on it first.

 

[exodus454]

so there arent any tricks i can use to fix the battery?

 

[voodle]

Not that I know of, if it won't charge at the moment, then you can't update the BIOS, and there's a chance it still won't charge even if you do successfully update it.

There are some people who connected the battery terminals up to a charger at 12 volts and 1 amp, but that's very dangerous to do with a lithium ion battery because if you overcharge it, it can catch fire or possibly explode.

You can't do anything like the freezer trick with it because the battery chemistry is different and they don't work like that any more.

 

[exodus454]

ok, in that case, do you know where i can get a battery for less than $100 thats better than the OEM battery?

I think its kinda stupid to pay $125 for the original battery when its just going to fail again. I think if i cant find a battery with better reliability, then i'll just trade the laptop for something else.

Any suggestions?

Best one I found was a 4000mAh battery for $102. Is the mAh rating a factor in determining the length of the charge? because if theres not a big difference then i can get a 3600mAh for $77.

 

[voodle]

Both of those batteries are good, the 4000mah battery has 43Wh of capacity while the 3600mah battery has 38Wh of capacity. That's 20-30 minutes of run time. So it's up to you really. I don't know much about the 600 series batteries but I do know that they sell for far too much on ebay because of demand.