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Would you buy a new battery for a very old laptop? (self.technology)

submitted 1 year ago by Mummelpuffin to c/technology

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I just got a pretty good deal on an old ThinkPad (think 10 years old now) to use as a beater for screwing with ArchLinux and hopefully to find a real use for. It's in great shape like it was never really used, but big shock, the battery is at 50% effective capacity and what's there disappears in less than an hour.

Would you bother buying a battery replacement for it? On one hand I want it to actually be usable on the go because that was sort of the point. On the other, while replacement batteries exist, I'm worried that they're already very old themselves and already "expired". Would you take the chance? I don't want to let this thing go to waste when it's still perfectly usable, in fact it's pretty fast.

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[–] beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago

I'd do it, even with the risk of buying a crap battery, especially with Arch. I'm typing this on a 2014 Lenovo with Arch and XFCE. The main thing it has trouble with is the external 4K display which is a bit sluggish--I turned compositing off to make it a bit better. The battery health is about 80%, last I checked, so I haven't bothered to replace it. (Also, full disclosure, this is effectively my "desktop", so it stays plugged in all the time; I keep the battery charged to 50%.)

But I tend to run computers until they die die, getting a perverse kick out of maximizing the use of old hardware. This machine used to be a Windows machine until it became so sluggish as to be unusable. Putting Linux on it was like dropping the lead weights in a sprint.