reconditioning cf-c1 batteries with new 18650 cells ? how doable is it ?

EDIT :
I am going to use this thread as a general discussion thread for the CF-C1 now (the battery question has been answered but I want to see if it might be better to keep the discussion general so that CF-C1 users keeps a discussion open for a longer time)

Wiki Page for the CF-C1 : https://panasonic.fandom.com/wiki/CF-C1

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Original message :


Hello, saw a guy on ( see comments under user cliz305) saying he reconditioned cf-c1 batteries with cheap 18650 cells ... I tried to open my 60% used battery but wasn't able to find a "not too brutal" way of doing so ...
... any opinion/help on this ??
Thanks !!

PS :
I also see, for example in this thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/cf19-battery-refurbishing.700827/ , that there's probably some kind of charge counter in my battery that would make putting new cells in it useless ...

 

Your concerns are valid. Only way I know to open batteries is hammer a sturdy knife along the case seam. And every Panasonic battery I know of since about 2000 has an internal controller that no one has yet claimed to reset. But if you know a bit about batteries and don't mind risking yours, go for it!

PS: Panasonic makes the *best* 18650 cells - I have 20 year old Toughbook batteries that still take a charge.

 

Not worth trying to rebuild the battery. I have rebuilt for lenovo and hp but its sort of risky for fire and liability issues.
@Springfield I I totally agree with the panasonic batteries. I bought this year 4 older cf-t8 for friends kids. ebay surplus. I was expecting dead batteries. All of them held charges for hours. Even one of them was a t5. 10 year+ old batteries. I have a pile of toshiba, dell hp from fixing. Dell is the worse and most of these were probably 2+ years old

 

thanks for the info !

... I guess I've been a little bit unlucky that one of my c1 battery only has 40% of life left (the other has 70%) ... I saw some c1 batteries on ebay for less than $50 ... I guess I am going to buy one of these and forget about rebuilding my battery ... I wonder how well this rebuilding went for the guy on youtube though ...

 

by the way how were the screens on your t8s ??
... I find my screen a little bit yellowish on my c1 ...
thanks again !

 

All of the t8 had around 20000 hours. They are not bright and would be no good outside. The t5 was really nice and bright but had low hours. Older tech ccfl backlight. You can swap most of those models. I used screen from t5 that was very bright on others if you dont mind losing the touch screen. I did change the tube a couple times on hp or toshiba. These little machines would be a pain to take the screen out and maybe not practical to take the lcd apart. They show up on surplus or scrap for cheap though.
My newer cf-c2 screen is very bright that i keep it almost on the lowest setting.

 

yeah my C1 screen is not very bright either but it's OK with me ... I really need to put it at the right angle though as the vertical viewing angle is kind of small, especially under light ...

 

This is from a post I did some time ago. It was just sitting on my table when this happened. I rebuild it weeks before this happened...

 

I received a CF-C1 mk1 with no yellow screen issue (because it has only 1500 hours ! my cf-c1 mk2 has 62500 hours which translates to about 7 years and 2 months !!!!! no surprise if its screen is kind of yellowish ! )

I am wondering how doable would that be to replace the mk2 screen with the mk1 screen ???

 

PS : I am adding that my cf-c1 mk2 has 62500 hours (which translates to about 7 years and 2 months !) ... I received a cf-c1 mk1 with only 1500 hours and its batteries are much better with 10% and 15% of wear (90% and 85% of life left)

 

ps :
I really appreciate how easy it is to swap hard drives and batteries in my cf-c1s ...
Windows 10 is not as "swapable" as linux though : it took a long time to make a list of drivers or sthing like that when I swapped hard drives ... and the screen resolution was not right also ...the linux I installed on my cf-c1 mk2 worked almost immediately on my cf-cf1 mk1 : I just had to reenter my wifi pin code ...

 

I've rebuilt batteries and I could never get them to work right. Physically replacing cells is a hackjob, since the original cells are stapled in place, and replacing cells ourselves we really aren't capable of that. Soldering cells in with 63/37 seems to work ok, other than wiring making the overall battery assembly slightly larger, making it difficult to fit the cells back into their casing, which had to be forcibly pried open.

The biggest issue which I could never resolve is correcting the battery flash image. I manually set the higher cell capacity, which sort of worked. The battery would charge to 100%, but it would discharge to the high 20s% like normal, then suddenly jump to 7%, but then the system would run fine at 0% for about an hour. I set the lower wear level, which worked initially. The battery controller refused to auto update the wear level over time though, so it keeps trying to overcharge the battery, making it wear much faster.

 

Hey folks, I ve just received a second c1b (during confinement I ve spent a lot of time on ebay ) ... I really love how easy it is to swap hard drives and batteries between my C1s ... they should design more computers like this one (event if they might be a little thicker) ... 3 (almost identical) slots in the back (for 1 HD & 2 batteries) is really smart !

 

i find it so odd that every toughbook battery i got and some of them are from old models like cf-t5 and the batteries are like new. Probably have 100 batteries from from hp dell toshiba that last 2 years

 

happy to report that one of my CF-C1B has now 10GB
(bought one Samsung 8 Go PC3L-12800S DDR3-1600MHZ 1.35 V 204pin SO-DIMM for about $30 from memory_ram on ebay ... took 2 weeks to arrive in France with free shipping ... I ve just ordered another one for my second CF-C1B )
... I am also waiting for some cheap goldenfir ssds I ordered from aliexpress ...

I guess I wasn't very lucky then :
CF-C1A : 10% & 12% wear on the batteries (lucky on this one ! - it had sthg like only 1500 hours of use)
CF-C1B : 98% & 13% wear (not lucky)
CF-C1B : 60% & 30% wear (unlucky also)

PS :
oh and I am still waiting for a $40ish battery that I ordered on the 7th of may from ebay ... I guess batteries take a slower road than RAM chips ...

 

cf-t5 cf-t8 cf-w5. all lasted many hours, cannot tell the percent of wear though
cf-c2 seems to last for about 4 hours of playing emulators
cf-h2 about 2 hours. it has 2 small odd batteries for this model.
cf-19 mk5 or mk6 i forgot off hand. probably 2-3 hours
old toshiba i bought from 1997 20 min, pretty impressive still
batteries can be slow shipping since sometimes they no not ship by air depending where you live.
I was thinking of getting a couple spare batteries but its almost the same cost as buying a whole surplus machine and taking a chance.

 

I read battery wear with BatteryBar (free version)

wow my CF-C1B with 2 identical sodimms does 21+K at octane v2 whereas my 10GB CF-C1B does only 18-K ... I didn t know there would be such a big performance penalty with 2 different sodimms ...

 

Normally you can mix ram but it generally runs at the speed of the slowest ram. I would not think it would make much real world difference. Try heaven benchmark. I know its mostly gpu but you can see if it actually effects fps

 

received my 3 cheap goldenfir SSDs from aliexpress and cloned my old HDDs into them ... I barely needed a screwdriver as the CF-C1 hard-drive caddy is so well designed
... now my CF-C1s run quieter and feel faster

(only issue I had is that one of my SSDs was smaller (in capacity) than the old mechanical HDD and I wasn't able to clone the old HDD to it using clonezilla ... I just used Easeus Partition Manager cloning feature and it worked although I had 2 small issues (little error message when booting into Windows or lost screen resolution when booting into linux) that were easily fixed from linux)

received it a few days ago ... almost 11% wear although it was sold as "new" ... I guess it s OK ...

Oh and I received a very cheap CF-C1B this morning (cracked top cover, no hdd) and the wear on its batteries is only about 7 & 10 % ... I guess I was lucky on this one
and its integrated memory chip is 4GB so I can have a solid performing 8GB CF-C1B
(again : it was real nice to be able to so easily pop in my other hard drive in it )

 

Keep your eye out for a cf-c2. It is one of the better machines of that generation, haswell.
I was lucky my battery seems to last 4 hours while playing emulators.
I am looking for another one though ha. I have a touch screen but I want one with digitzer touch so i can use the magnetic pen for drawing.
Do a crystal mark bench on those hard drives. some of the cheaper ones perform the same as a reg hard drive. Curious to what you get. I been using msata drives with adapters on most of toughbooks i got. I was able to get samsung msata used in canada for cheap.

 

seems like some random write speeds are better on the bigger HDD ??

 

PS :
some people had better performance results in their tests ( https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32657147484.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.1e4f4c4dDsnx0k ) , maybe I am not running at full SATA3 speed ??

 

I cannot say for sure but i think sata 3 came out with sandy bridge. which is the i5-25xx chips. Is that what you have.? this benchmark is on a samsung on haswell or 4th gen intel sata 3. Some of the cheap ssds do not have a dram cache chip. it makes a big difference on the small files. Some of the cheap drives were only writing 2 megs a sec on multiple tiny files

 

try the maybe newer benchmark as ssd

considered slow compared to the newer NVMe

 

thanks for the inputs !

your evo 860 ssd has really good performance !

I ran my tests on CF-C1Bs with sandy bridge 2nd gen intel i5 2520m

I ve just ordered 2 new 512GB goldenfir SSDs for my new CF-C1Bs (I actually received 2 CF-C1Bs friday ... one was not supposed to boot to BIOS but I ve just checked and it boots perfectly fine ) ... maybe I ll have better performance with that size of SSDs ( I ve read somewhere that 180GB and 360GB are not conventional sizes for SSD and may offer less speed ...) ... I ll run a CrystalDisk BenchMark test on these too

 

bigger drives perform better since they have more chips. some of the cheaper ones only use 1 chip. My only issue would be reliability from cheap drives. I have some ancient ide drives that still work after 25 years. Had boxes full of seagate drives that failed after a few years. Time will tell

 

did somebody find cheap chargers for our old panasonic laptops ?
preferably on aliexpress ?

found this one : https://www.amazon.fr/Alimentation-...s=Panasonic&qid=1592898389&s=computers&sr=1-5 but it's 15E + 7E shipping ...

this one is cheaper at 9E : https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32700038009.html?spm=a2g0o.cart.0.0.a2fd3c005IZTYv&mp=1 but I need to check if I have some power cords at home ...

 

I've used IBM brand power adapters, rated 16V 4.5A which is plug compatible with all newer Toughbooks although not enough amperage to fully power some newer models especially with discrete graphics. Here is a combo AC/DC model on US eBay for $13 shipped: https://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-22P9003-FRU22P9021-AC-DC-Combo-Adapter-Charger-Power-Supply-16V-0-4-55A/183274348194

 

Thanks a lot ! very useful information !

I could save a few bucks by ordering these (less than 9E) chargers : https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32722315714.html?spm=2114.12010615.8148356.1.49ab4bf7BxNpbh (found some EU power cords at the office )

 

I'd recommend avoiding generic Chinese adapters and cords.

Chinese adapters with name brands like Dell or IBM meet rigorous quality standards - others may not. Many people keep adapters plugged in all the time. I've seen pictures of fires in homes started by cheap laptop adapters. Is it worth a few $ or euros to risk your life and everything you own?

 

thank you for the information, I have disconnected my cheap generic charger that came with my CF-C1 from ebay ...

 

I have used the IBM chargers for panasonic. they definitely work and my first choice. I bought 3 from ebay local but made in china. They all work fine. Even legit batteries and chargers can be bad. cf-c2 had a big recall on batteries. Had a few HP chargers that had recall either they ended up being used though ..

 

for information these tests made on an unknown brand chinese ssd (LVCARDS 120GB) are better than the ones on my CF-C1b :
https://www.casimages.com/i/200601035607468351.png.html
(source : https://forum.hardware.fr/hfr/Hardware/SSD/endurance-noname-aliexpress-sujet_1048512_1.htm#t10785130 )

 

went to hwinfo64, it indicates that my drive controller is Serial ATA 6Gbs @ 3 Gbs

hence lower speed than real SATA3 !

there has been a lot of talks about this limitation by panasonic , for example :
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...running-at-sata-2-speed-please-advise.796631/

 

yeah the performance is much better from an usb enclosure (with my matebook 13)

 

Usb 3.1 is fast in theory 10Gbps so it should be similar to the sata but I think random reads and writes will be slower on usb still. Its still good speeds.
Probably not even noticeable in real world performance. I am using all sata drives. There are many benchmarks that will compare sata to nvme and loading games or windows is only a difference of sometimes less then 1 second. Still huge difference from regular hd. I bought my first one long time ago and it was worth it for gaming. Skyrim would load for 10-15 seconds every time you for example went into an area where the ssd was instant.

 

received a $43 "new" battery from ebay ... it had a 21% wear ... seller sent me a $15 refund although I only asked for about $5

 

thats good you got something back since most will never check condition

 

Noticed a nice wiki page for the CF-C1 : https://panasonic.fandom.com/wiki/CF-C1

And also some manuals : https://www.manualslib.com/products/Panasonic-Cf-C1-Series-4261489.html

 

a friend had an issue with windows on her C1 : I swapped my hard drive with hers : that was fast and easy to fix her issue

I installed clear linux on my "new" hard drive : very fast distro (I think Octane V2 is almost 25k in chrome compared to a little less than 21k in Windows Edge) ... but it s using gpt so I could not boot windows ... I have now installed it on a small usb memory stick ... kind of slow to start but when it's started it s fast ... I have put /home on my hard drive (SSD actually) for better speed when web browsing ...