What are our thoughts on third party laptop batteries?
I very much love my X220 and don't want to let it go, but both of the official batteries I have are about a third of the capacity they're supposed to be now.
There are still official Lenovo batteries on the market (for 80 quid) but I would assume these things have been sitting on shelves for long enough that they're probably half dead anyway.
Are Chinese knock-offs really that bad? I'd have thought we were at a stage in battery technology where they're probably as good as the ones made in the 'official' Taiwanese factory anyway. But at the same time I'm very aware that the potential for disaster is fairly high in a Li-ion pack.
Another possible move is that these battery packs are just a big plastic case full of 18650 cells. It's within my capabilities to spudge one open and replace the old cells with new 'trusted' ones, but it's a lot of hassle if the chinese ones aren't going to set fire to my cock.
Never had an X220 myself, but for the price the knock-off batteries I got off ebay for T4xx-s used to be fine for the price. I mean, none of them burst into flames and boiled my nads off or anything.
How do you find them? I could never quite work out the difference between the X2xx models and the T4xx's - are the latter just a bit bigger? Everything else seems about the same.
I had macbooks for years which are admittedly lovely but the thinkpad keyboard is just too good, and it did get old quick not being able to service the Apple stuff myself. This thinkpad is 80% replacements and upgrades at this point.
I liked the T410/420/430 because I could get a refurb off ebay for under £200 with 4gb ram and a 512mb shitty hdd, swap in 16gb ram and a 1tb hdd and have a half decent laptop for an ok price. The fact that they all ran linux straight out of the box with no faffing was also a godsend.
> How do you find them?
I just go on ebay and search "thinkpad T420"
> I could never quite work out the difference between the X2xx models and the T4xx's
As I understand the older X2xx models were smaller, square, and had a max 12" screen. The T4xx models are rectangular and usually have a 14" screen which for a squinty old cunt like me is right nice.
The trick with the T4xx models is to make sure you're buying one with 4 ram slots, two under a flap in the base and two under the keyboard - each slot takes 4gb and as long as the CPU isn't from the stone ages you're laughing.*
*Myths abound that with certain i5 and i7 models you could use 4x8gb and really soup the fucker up. I was never flush enough to give it a whirl though.
That's basically all the reasons I like my X220. The worst thing about it is definitely screen real estate - 1366x768 does feel a bit out of date, especially considering otherwise it's still a bloody fast computer 6 years on.
>I just go on ebay and search "thinkpad T420"
Cheeky bastard.
>The trick with the T4xx models is to make sure you're buying one with 4 ram slots
That's a nice thing to have indeed. The X's seem to have 2 slots even now, so that'd be a load of fun. I'll have to investigate. Thanks.
So I went ahead and ordered a 20 quid ball-burner chinese battery, but I've also ordered a refurb i7 T430 to 'have a go' and I'm also eyeing up an X270 for a birthday present for myself.
The Chinese ones tend to be crap because they're thrown together with the cheapest 18650s they can find. This doesn't just mean safety is questionable, it also means they tend to have poor capacity and lose their capacity quickly.
Stripping down a pack and replacing the cells really is the best way to do it, but you need a spot welder and a supply of the nickel tabs to connect the batteries with. You can build a spot welder from a pile of capacitors if you're so inclined.
I really, really wish that someone would go into business making packs with decent cells and a reliable supply chain. There's no shortage of supply of cloned plastic casings in Shenzhen to match every laptop battery.
That's what I had assumed. I do have a spot welder and it's about as chinese and dodgy as the batteries we're talking about.
There are various cell contact kits floating about, basically little caps you slip over the ends of cells. I think mostly because of people building their own vape mods and that. I do think you could probably get away without welding.
I have to confess when I was daydreaming about this in bed this morning I thought for a good five minutes about how I'd just solder the cells up. Not my finest moment.
>I really, really wish that someone would go into business making packs with decent cells and a reliable supply chain. There's no shortage of supply of cloned plastic casings in Shenzhen to match every laptop battery.
I'd genuinely love that and I can think of a few simple ways to make it a modular operation. I don't think there's a market for it apart from nerds like us, though. Most people don't have sentimental laptops they want to use seven years after they're built. I don't even think most people have laptops at all anymore.
>>26372 On those points, perhaps not, but technically - they have been building all of our stuff for ages. Personally I would buy one of the older official IBM batteries that have been sitting on the shelf for years, before I started to lash something up.
Banggood will be your friend more than eBay I think, but as it is a battery, expect a long shipping time.
>Personally I would buy one of the older official IBM batteries that have been sitting on the shelf for years
This was my first thought, but A) they cost almost as much as an entire X220 these days, and B) I was under the impression that Li-Ions self-discharge over time in storage, and therefore a battery sat in a warehouse for a few years will have lost a fair bit of capacity. And from what I can tell, they stopped producing these particular batts about four years ago.
Perhaps the charge lost on a stored battery is still better than the charge that will be rapidly lost in the first few months of a shite chinese clone, but I can't find anything other than opinion on this.
That's fucking fantastic. I wonder if that'd be feasible in not-so-sunny england. I've seen the council put solar on their roofs now, but I can't imagine there's much throughput.
My grandparents house has a fairly feisty river flowing past it, I've always wondered if we could hydroelectric it. My granddad would love this too, I'll have to show him.
>>26377 >fairly feisty river flowing past it, I've always wondered if we could hydroelectric it
Oh man, I have always always wanted to do that. I don't know why we aren't doing a load more tidal and hydro in the UK, we're surrounded by water. Seems obvious, though I understand the engineering challenges.
A modern day watermill, oh god the fantasies I have about that.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I think it's plausible with that sort of power storage, too.
I worked for a restaurant once that was talking about piping steam and heat from the kitchen to partially power the place somehow. I do hope they did it, though it sounded a bit like a pipe dream (no pun intended) at the time.
> Perhaps the charge lost on a stored battery is still better than the charge that will be rapidly lost in the first few months of a shite chinese clone, but I can't find anything other than opinion on this.
My personal experience is that my own rebuilt pack with good Panasonic 18650s performed and lasted better than an old-stock original pack, which in turn performed better than all of the several cheap ones I bought in the Huaqiangbei market. In fact the only thing the latter were good for were stripping down to reuse with better cells.
The one I've bought holds the charge it advertises, I'm very curious to see how quickly it all goes downhill, I can imagine very soon.
I've been reading the newer Thinkpads have authentication chips in them, is that common or just Lenovo being Lenovo? Bit of a moot point since I usually reflash to coreboot, but still.
Intriguing that it's lost a lot of capacity in one cycle. Not sure if it's just confusing TLP because it was half charged when I put it in or what, system seems to see another 10%. Lasted about 9 hours though. Even if I only get a couple of months out of it that's sort of alright for 16 quid.
This off-topic but as the OP mentioned the X220 I might as well mention it.
I've been drooling over the X230t for years but now it's getting on a bit, and unfortunately it seems like it's the last of the great convertible laptops to be produced before we started suffering under the current wave of flimsy 'tablet with a keyboard attached' shite.
Is there a modern equivalent of these business tablet PCs?
>Is there a modern equivalent of these business tablet PCs?
Lenovo make a 'Yoga' line of laptops, and specifically 'Thinkpad Yoga' models, which are essentially a continuation of the X230T. The Yoga 370 and Yoga 260 seem to be the 'thinkpad' ones. But honestly I don't know much about them - they look cool, though.
The X220/30 tablets are still absolutely relative today - there are a fucktonne of people who still use these models (and the non tablet equivalents) today. Processor advances have been more about efficiency upgrades than power in the last half a decade, so they really do still keep up, albeit at the cost of battery life (6-8 hours from an X230T is still good in my book though)
The added hidden benefit of the T models is you're guaranteed to get a good screen and not have to hunt around for the IPS models like you to with the non-tablets.
I have an X220T right here next to me, though the screen is fucked (I really had to try though - stood right on it). It was a lovely experience, and I can imagine it being an incredible tool for anyone who draws or likes handwriting stuff.
Obviously I don't know what you intend to do with it, but I bet it would keep up with what you needed it for, at least for a few more years.
>>26391 The fingerprint scanner (TouchID) is the only good thing about the latest MacBook Pro's, which are otherwise the worst keyboard I have ever touched. The touch bar is an abomination. I quickly changed back to an MBP without that fucking thing.
My phone's more modern fingerprint scanner is great - literally just touch to unlock - but the old Thinkpad ones are not nearly as quick or reliable. It's nice that the scan clearly happens on bare metal but other than that it's an arse, I can never seem to get it to scan first try.
I agree with you about that fucking touchbar. Very disappointing you can't get the top spec CPU without it. I really like the space grey look as well, but if I'm buying new I want top flight as I expect to be using it for ages. I was just about ready to drop the cash too but them Thinkpads...
>>26394 >I agree with you about that fucking touchbar.
My work one lasted two weeks before I got another one - I was forever accidentally pressing the buttons and triggering an action - the catastrophic one was during Mail my longest finger would accidentally hit the "Send" hot key. The third time I had to apologise to a colleague for a half-written draft email getting to them it fucking went. I had the luxury of just being able to order another one without it and re-assign mine to some poor junior dev, but most people won't.
I hate to say it, but Apple have lost their touch since Jobs went.
Agreed. I'm lucky in that I don't really have anything I need OS X for, but it's odd not having it as my primary system these days.
Thinkpads really are the only other choice for me, I do love them almost as much as MBPs, and they're blaaaaack which is even better; even then though, Lenovo have officially fucked them - in the latest X280 they have finally removed the fullsize ethernet jack, amongst other things.
My last work laptop was an X1 carbon, which was a dream, but lacking ports, not that I needed them. They'd bought Surfaces for everyone else but I had to throw a hissy fit on that one. I deserve better.
I'm really struggling to think of a contender for those two, mind - the Razer ultrabook (hate that word) I've heard surprisingly good things about, but not exactly businesslike.
I noticed that too. Battery life is poor too, and the keyboard is basically a novelty. I struggle to think of a worse solution to give to a bunch of roving managers who spend all day typing reports.
We might very well old Gits but we're not wrong. I do wonder why though - with smartphones and cheap tablets all but destroying the 'normal people' laptop market, it stands to reason that professional/business laptops should be getting even more oriented at the likes of us, yet they seem to be intent on stripping away functionality and adding bells and/or whistles.
Because they don't make good technology in general anymore.
I don't know where exactly it all went wrong but everything just fucking slipped off in completely the wrong direction around the late 00's. What happened to discrete MP3 players? Why can't I buy a fucking 4TB MP3 player? Why is everything touch screen when touch screen is awful? Why does every platform have its own walled garden content delivery service? WHY?
Because smartphones exist. I'd be well impressed if you actually needed 4TB. Still probably cheaper just to pay spotify a tenner a month for rather a respectable library
>Why is everything touch screen when touch screen is awful?
Do you really think so? They used to be dreadful but I think modern touch screens are really quite nice.
>>26401 modern touch screens are really quite nice.
They're really not. It tends to take a few goes to make any touch screen register for me, and because I've got to press hard and have massive fingers, it's a complete lottery as to where the touch is registered. They're getting better, but still very annoying. At least I knew where I was with resistive screens, and could use a stylus or a fingernail.
Slider controls may as well fuck off, too. Just roll dice to divine my intentions.
That's interesting. I feel like everything since about iPad 1 has been seamless for me. I don't think I've ever had problems with non-registered touches, even on my cheapy tablets.
I guess we just have different hands or summat. I should check my privilege then.
Yes but smartphones only come with pisspoor amounts of memory, and an arbitrary cap on the amount of SD expansion it supports.
Believe it or not I have a music collection that surpasses a terabyte, and most of it is in plain old MP3 rather than some daft lossless format as you might expect at those levels. Spotify certainly doesn't have all of it, probably not even two thirds, considering how much of it is obscure underground metal from the last couple of decades. Those type of artists don't get on Spotify because Spotify (unlike bandcamp etc) is not open to creators, it just serves to perpetuate labels, distributors, and other such middlemen, while continuing to fuck over the artists. But I digress, that's another debate entirely.
No, I don't NEED all of that on me at once, but I don't care about that- The technology should be there by now.
You're one of them and I don't like you because of it. I bet you don't even get pissed off how everything has forced updates nowadays.
It is a bit odd that they don't deal with it directly, but you can get your music on there via an aggregator. Whether that's worth it or not is another discussion, though a couple of artists I've been involved with are on there and seem to do alright by it.
>You're one of them
I promise I'm not. I run linux and everything. I used to care about having all my music in one place, but I suppose since the music I happen to want to listen to is available via streaming and I have unlimited 4G, I'd be silly to do anything else.
And the technology definitely is there for your mega mp3 player, just not the market. I could make you one if you like. It'll cost you about a grand just for the 4TB SSD, mind.
>Spotify (unlike bandcamp etc) is not open to creators
CDbaby will handle all of the digital releasing for an independent artist. The artist uploads their record to CDbaby, who then make it available on over a hundred streaming and download sites. They charge $49 per album and take a 9% commission on royalty payments. It's a ludicrously good deal for artists.
That's what I ended up doing with my band, although I feel like such services are still exploitation, rather than the empowerment the internet ought to have afforded musicians. But that's probably just my inner commie speaking.
For the life of me though, I can't think of any other reason the likes of iTunes etc aren't open to creators, other than to prop up the increasingly obsolete older segments of the industry.
I hate to be the grumpy old man not really, but you kids don't know how good you've got it. Back in my day, bands would scrimp and save for a couple of days in a crap demo studio. We usually booked the overnight shift because it was slightly cheaper. I can't begin to describe the heat and smell of a room that's lined in acoustic foam, full of hot analogue equipment, completely unventilated and being used 24/7. A reel of 2" tape cost a couple of hundred quid and only held 16 1/2 minutes of multitrack audio, so keeping your multitracks was an absurd luxury. The closest thing we had to home recording was a Portastudio, which cost about as much as a top-of-the-range Macbook. The only way to get your music heard by a wider audience was to send a tape to John Peel and cross your fingers.
Paying CDbaby £35 to release your album to the world is pocket money in the broader scheme of things. You don't need a record deal, you don't need a studio, you don't have to pay for pressing and you get to keep the majority of your royalties.
You're not wrong, though there was nowt wrong with Portastudio. The record labels ran on cassette for a while, back when they'd get 15 million demo tapes in from their A&R.
Computer recording is still a very recent luxury - even when I was getting into the game in the naughties it was an exciting new novelty to record to HDD. I'd argue you still need to spend money (or invest time learning the skills) to get a usable demo.
Audio recording will however always be a bizarre fight between bleeding edge digital technology and a rack full of weird tube pres and compressors and a bucket reverb you found in someone's garage. I love it.
That's the problem though, Before the 90s happened artists got a pretty decent deal, then it got progressively worse but still alright, and now you get a cheque for 25p from PRS every three months. The fact that it's piss easy to get your music out there is both a blessing and a curse - it has diluted the pool somewhat.
>Before the 90s happened artists got a pretty decent deal
We really didn't. They looked like OK deals because records sold in fantastic quantity, but the absolute percentages were horrible.
If you were a big artist and had a really good agent, you might have got 18% net. Out of that share, you paid for promotion, pressing and distribution. That tour bus? It's coming out of your royalties. The fancy sleeve with the holographic artwork? It's coming out of your royalties. The label takes the majority of the royalties, but then dumps all of their costs onto the artist. That 18% net deal gets whittled down to about 2% gross. Major artists might have been millionaires, but that's only because their labels were earning hundreds of millions. It was daylight robbery, but they got away with it because there was so much money sloshing around.
Deals started to look worse in the 90s, but that's mainly because CD sales started to collapse after the launch of Napster. The cost of recording and promotion were relatively fixed, so an increasing proportion of artists found themselves failing to recoup. Things only started getting objectively worse in the late 00s, when labels started offering 360 deals that covered record sales, live revenues and merch.
A notorious example of dirty record label accounting is something called breakage. Back in the days of vinyl, record labels would deduct about 20% of the artist's royalties for breakage, ostensibly because vinyl records were fragile and a lot of them got broken before reaching the retailers. The idea that one in five records were broken in transit somewhat stretches the limits of plausibility, but ho hum. When CDs arrived, the record labels were advertising them to the public as unbreakable, but they still charged 20% breakage. Ostensibly this was because the smaller CDs were easier to shoplift. When iTunes came along, the labels still charged 20% breakage for something that's literally impossible to break. It's 2018, most recording revenues are from streaming and the labels are still charging 20% breakage.
I first started learning production techniques in the mid 00's before the "home recording revolution" really took off, but if anything my feelings are mixed at best about what it has done for music as a whole. Back then, there was no room for "all the gear, no idea" types. Anyone can play at being a musician these days, and it's harder for the ones with talent to shine out above the sea of rubbish- Which has only reinforced the power of labels and publishers.
Things have just gone completely the opposite of how I hoped they would, really. I was one of those people who really believed in the whole "Music can just be free for everyone, and we'll make all our money on gigs and merchandise!" utopian mindset in the early days of online distribution. No need for labels, kills the concept of piracy dead... But here we are a decade later, and it's pretty much just the same as it ever was, only there are no physical copies any more.
