Battery swap w/o powering down

Does such a feature exist for Thinkpads? I know it does on the Macbook Pro's and Fujitsus. It would be very convenient for me to switch from my 7-cell battery to a fully-charged 6-cell batery I'm getting (thanks to Lenovo's incompetence) when I'm out of juice.

 

How does that work on the macbooks? You can get an ultrabay battery and use that. That way you can switch whenever. I haven't tried it, but I'm pretty sure it would work.

 

You just take it out and quickly put another battery in.

 

ive never heard of people doing that before.. so do macbooks have a small buffer on the power as its coming into the laptop or something? how long do you have? when was this feature implemented? is it actually supported by apple or is this a at your own risk thing?

 

Ooh, I'd love this.

By the way, will a T61, or any recent TP, run on AC without a battery inserted?

 

My t60 does.

Also regarding the non-power down macbook swaps, I have always seen those put into the sleep state THEN swap the batteries.

 

that makes more sense.. although my last question about the power being buffered still applies

 

All notebooks will run on AC without a battery. My toshiba laptop from 1994 did it. My laptop right now is doing it. In order to stay on, the macbook needs a buffer like spike said. I don't think it has one and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a big enough cap bank. Are you sure you have your facts right?

Unless you're talking about switching batteries on AC power. If you have AC power than you can take out the battery and switch it as many times as you like and it'll stay on. That applies to any laptop.

 

LEFT click on the battery gauge in the taskbar (assuming you are running the Lenovo power manager). what do you see? i haven't tried it yet so let me know if it works...

 

I'm talking about switching batteries without AC power and powering the computer down. Fujitsu introduced the technology on their laptops back in 2001:

http://www.fujitsu.com/hk/news/2001/eseries_eng.html

 

Reading the specifics on it, you could say Lenovo has had the same thing for as long as the optical bay battery existed. When secondary battery is inside the modular bay and of capable charge, you can remove the primary battery and swap in a new fully charged battery. Thinkpads and almost any other laptop that has a 2nd battery option (dells, hp, almost any business laptop) will work like this.

 

So the T61 ultrabay is hot swappable? I can take my optical drive out, slap in the battery, switch the main battery, then slap the optical drive back in?