When I bought my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad Z61t, I chose the lowest-end battery option because the battery is one of the easiest parts to replace in a laptop computer. I always intended to someday get a battery that would last longer, so that I could truly have laptop portability.

While preparing for BigSeminar X (more about it on my personal blog here), I saw that, due to the fire code and other reasons, they will not be allowing us to plug in our laptops to charge. Looks like I will be needing that extended battery now!

So I opted to pick up one from a third-party vendor on eBay, Titan Notebook in Gardena, CA. It was about half the cost of what Lenovo would charge me for what appears to be the same thing.

I put my laptop into Hibernate (anyone know if battery swapping can be done from sleep or suspend?), took out the small battery, and put in the new, larger, 7-cell battery. Then I hit this interesting “snag”:

Interesting that Lenovo’s battery software can detect that this is not an official Lenovo battery. I wonder if there really is any quality difference in this case. The message reads:

“The battery installed in this computer is not a genuine Lenovo battery and may not meet Lenovo’s safety and quality standards. Double click to learn about genuine Lenovo batteries.

I searched for this phrase, “not a genuine lenovo battery” in Google and it gave me zero results. So then I searched for the same thing in Yahoo!, and I got one very useful result, from the thinkpads.com forum.

Google search results lose again. I have blogged this before, with different search phrases. When will I learn, and switch to Yahoo! because they have superior search? Not for awhile.. I’m too much of a Google fan now

I really feel bad for Yahoo! though, because they’re actually doing a darn good job with Search now. Kudos to them.

Back to the non-Lenovo battery. When I double-click that exclamation mark, it first asks if I want to send info to Lenovo:

Very nice of them to ask, since they easily could have done it stealthily *cough* Microsoft *cough*. Clicking OK is not too useful, though. It takes me to this generic power accessories page, and not even my laptop model is pre-selected.