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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Thu, 21 Feb 2013

Aftermarket replacement battery on the cheap for the Lenovo G555

I've had the Lenovo G555 for about 2 3/4 years at this point, and I've had another part fail -- the battery.

A laptop battery losing its ability to hold a charge after two years is by no means unusual.

Laptop batteries can be pricey. I've seen them go for -- and that's for a computer that's worth maybe .

When my LCD power inverter went when I had the Lenovo for about two years -- a bit early -- and I was able to replace what is usually a part by spending and change on eBay, I decided to look around before committing to a new battery.

I saw aftermarket batteries going for anywhere from to . That's quite a range. Some claimed to be better. Those offered a two-year warranty. Most of the time, it would take another to in shipping to complete the transaction.

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Posted: Feb 21, 2013 05:00am UTC

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Category: /hardware/computers/lenovo/

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Tue, 31 Jan 2012

Laptop overheating, causing thermal shutdown during prolonged, CPU-intensive tasks

I've had my Lenovo G555 laptop (AMD Athlon II at 2.1 GHz) for nearly two years, and recently I've been experiencing thermal shutdowns while running prolonged, CPU-intensive tasks in Debian Squeeze.

Perhaps ironically but probably totally explainable, watching Flash video is not one of these tasks. I can watch Flash-delivered content in Hulu all night, and the Lenovo is fine.

The laptop overheats and shuts down when doing two things:

  • Java-heavy tasks like listening to networked, software-defined-radio sites like http://w4ax.com

  • Rendering videos in OpenShot

Two things that are very CPU-intensive, indeed.

So what did I do about this?

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Posted: Jan 31, 2012 3:28pm UTC

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