Laptop Struggling

My laptop is over 4 years old now, purchased from Novatech after my Compaq died and I did rather well on the insurance.  It has served me very nicely, running most of my development software and the long list of essential utilities I have now amassed.  During my time at Xerox, it went through a couple of upgrades, the most interesting of which was repacking the battery.

A mate of mine at work discovered a place in the Far East where you could order the individual cells from so I jumped in with him and we ordered a whole batch between us.  They came with the rather daunting warning of being highly explosive if punctured!  It rejuvenated the battery for a year and I can still get an hour out of it, so not bad for a £50 investment.  Here I am re-soldering the pack:

I’ve left it defragmenting the hard drive – 24% defragmentation over 30GB of data, no wonder it’s been chugging a bit.  It’s got more serious problems though, the power keeps cutting out, which I think must be to do with the location of a temperature probe and the surroundings getting too hot, so the power unit just switches off as a safety mechanism.  I’m loathe to dive into that circuitry and given that it will run happily from AC without the battery I might turn it into a portable desktop.

My browser history is starting to fill up with visits to Lenovo 🙂