Swap batteries on the fly

Hi,

i have the feeling that the question is for laugh only, but i am curious and so here it goes:

I received today my new 9-cell battery, so now i have the new as the old 6-cell one.
Is there a way, when the primary battery goes down, to on-the-fly swap the batteries WITHOUT having to shut the pc down and then do the swap ??

 

Sorry, but I think you'll have to standby or hibernate..
Swapping batteries in standby might not even work though... My sister's notebook which has a bridge battery can resume to Windows, but mine just turns on as if it had been turned off the whole time.

 

Hmmm..i also do not think standby would work, because it still needs the battery to be present on the machine so it can be in "standby" state...

 

Negative. The computer needs electrical energy to run or even sit in standby, therefore in order to swap the batteries you need either to shut down or to hibernate.

 

I thought so...Anyway, thanks!

 

One further comment: when hibernating and resuming from hibernation, Windows will assume that the hardware has not changed. If it has changed but not drastically, Windows can recover (for example you hibernated with an external mouse connected and you unplugged it before de-hibernating). For more drastic hardware changes (e.g. undocking from a docking station) sometimes Windows does not recover (although mine does! no clue why ). If it does not recover it might not detect your new hardware and/or might behave erratically, forcing you to a reboot.

In conclusion, hibernate does not draw any power from your battery but you might still need to reboot, depending on how "severe" a battery change is. I would guess you won't need a reboot, but it's not 100% guaranteed.

 

I see...I then, will have to try and see what happens.

 

It really would be nice if Thinkpads had a very small (1 WHr or similar) internal battery that would work for a warm swap (standby to change batteries). Hibernate is really slow on my machine (2GB RAM, Hitachi 5k320 drive), and I think it would be even worse if I put in 4GB of RAM (Windows has to write the entire contents of RAM to the disc).

For this reason, I plan on just using a single 8 cell battery until it gets really weak and then buying another to replace it (will retire the old one at that time), because swapping is too much of a hassle this way.

 

I guess you're unable to plug it in while swapping batteries? That would be the only way.

 

I was going to suggest that... thought it was a little too obvious.

I'm assuming objectref means swapping batteries when charging is not an option (because otherwise, why would he swap?).

 

yeap! but don't worry, if the only option is hibernate, then i will do that, no problem.

 

Ultrabay battery.

 

Doesn't work. Everything I have read implies that the Ultrabay battery is used before the main battery (it is also drained to 0%, quickly reducing long term life) and is not hot swappable. For this reason, it is not possible to use the Ultrabay battery as a bridge to swap the mains (without going to hibernate). Otherwise I would have considered one for my T40 (and I may have considered an x300 instead of an x200).

 

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_use_UltraBay_batteries

 

A somewhat different question -- I will generally be using the T400 with the A/C connection and not battery alone. I travel a lot and for long trips, there will be onboard laptop power connections. So, to save weight I was thinking of going smaller - to the 4 cell battery, which is flush to the case and lighter I assume than the 6 I have. There are many vendors selling OEM batteries much cheaper than from Lenovo. Does nayone have a suggested vendor for OEM batteries? Thanks,

 

I have bought IBM/Lenovo batteries from CalCellular in the past. Quality was good and prices were fair. However, I don't know if they have batteries for the newest models (x200, x300, etc.) yet. Although I think the T400 uses the same as the T61 wide, so they might have them.

 

Your only choice is hibernate. Hibernate saves your session to the HD, unlike standby, which saves it to RAM. Hibernate and quickly swap the battery.

 

You need to hibernate. When you click the power gauge and select "remove and replace battery", it puts it in hibernate.

 

Uhuu...

It IS hotswappable. You just put it in before you are going to unplug the mainbattery.

How I know? Well, I have a T61 + 6 cell battery + 7 cell battery + Ultrabay battery.

 

My mistake. I had read that they are not hot-swappable, but if you have all 3 of those batteries and have swapped them, I will trust real world usage over a random spec sheet.