It took a couple of months but i finally found a battery replacement for my old but trusty thinkpad t430s. It is a 3rd party battery, as this laptop is the better part of 10 years old. For that same reason i didn’t bother checking if there was anything blocking the use of 3rd party batteries. You can imagine my surprise when i was greeted with a message just after the bios check, stating an error with the battery not being original and that it was unable to charge. Booting to windows revealed a similar message and confirmed that the battery was indeed, not charging.

After a quick google search, it became apparent that this is a feature implemented as a security measure against low quality or fake batteries. As most things, tt is also a subject of much controversy. Fortunately, there’s a patch that enables the use of a 7 row classic keyboard and disables the check for the original battery. The procedure is straightforward, involving a bios downgrade and then patching the bios with a modified image built in linux. And while i am, in theory, against downgrading in general, this was a no-brainer.

After the patch, the laptop boots without an error message. It took almost 40 minutes, but started to slowly charge the battery. I also tested how much time could it run on the battery after fully charged, and was again surprised with a time just above 6 hours. Although it wasn’t the most realistic test, i’m happy to get even half that working on some documents and checking my email.