X60 as netbook / Batteries?

Like many I needed a small computer for travel. I'm into photography so I bought an Acer netbook to offload my SD card images. I went on a two week trip and man, I hated that netbook. It was barely able to do the most simple of things. I sold it on Craigslist when I got home.

I got a bright idea suddenly - why not try an old X60 as a netbook? Well I bought one off eBay for $109 and had to buy a battery for $20. This thing is awesome! I installed Ubuntu on it and it boots in about 24 seconds.

I got lucky, the keyboard is like new. It's not all great, the older laptops suck power like nothing else. It's a bit larger than a netbook but so much nicer. It has a 60gb drive which is OK for now but I'll eventually get a larger one. 32gb jump drives are real cheap now so that's another option for some storage.

So what I'm wondering is, for how long should a genuine battery last and how would I acquire one? Is it possible to replace a battery with new cells? I'm suspicious that every imitation battery is skimping on the cells.

How long should battery life be with a new battery? I haven't used this one enough in practice to get a good idea but it feels like maybe 2 hours.

 

I did the X61s review for NBR. As I recall the battery life was around 6.5 hours with the eight-cell. Since the X61s used a LV CPU, I'd expect a little less on the X60. Six hours seems about right, though much will depend on the settings. I'd expect half that if you go with the four-cell.

How much battery life you get will depend a lot on the shape of the battery. If it's old and worn, two hours isn't that bad.

 

It's a brand new battery, but a generic one. I'm also using Ubuntu Linux, and last time I used Linux on a laptop the battery life was atrocious. But that was a few years ago so maybe now things have improved.

It's a 4-cell battery. Three would be nice! Nothing like the 6 the netbook got but it wasn't worth it, what a piece of garbage it was.

 

on my X60 it was like 5 to 6 hours on battery saver mode in XP.

 

They have, and quite a bit. But the out of the box power efficiency is unlikely to be anywhere close to optimal (just as a generic Windows install without proper driver setup, etc. won't produce good results.)