I purchased this slice battery with the hopes of dramatically increasing (based upon the huge size & weight) the battery life of my W510 (4389-N9U).

While I'm pretty disappointed in less than expected additional battery life, I could live with it if it didn't have another serious flaw. That flaw is when the W510 is in sleep mode and I disconnect the battery, the W510 apparently loses all power which kills sleep mode and shuts it down completely. This is with the regular system battery still attached and fully charged.

This used to happen with my old T60p when ejecting from a docking station until IBM (at that time) came out with some little rubber bumpers, to avoid static, to be installed on some little metal prongs on the dock.

Does anyone know if this is "normal" (if so it is obviously a design flaw), or is my battery potentially defective? Does anyone else have one of these?

I have the slice battery and experience the same behaviour with my T510. I found out the hard way. If this is "working as designed" it certainly wasn't documented on the setup diagram which came with the battery.

The battery uses the docking connector and I regularly "rip-n-go" from my dock, and never lose power regardless of the laptop's state, so I don't understand why this should happen.

It would be great to hear from anyone else who *hasn't* experienced total power loss - hopefully we both have defective batteries.

No it is not normal that your W510 shuts down completely when undocking. I do the same every time - put it to sleep and undock and it never shut down. There is a battery firmware update, which might help but I guess it is the battery.

I use 9 cell slice battery as well.

I never have the problem when undocking. I use an Advanced Dock both at home and the office without difficulty. I only have the problem when disconnecting the slice battery. Where did you find the firmware update for the battery. I have not found anything on the Lenovo support site, but I'll look again. If you have a link it would be much appreciated.

Can anyone else confirm if this bad behavior of the slice battery is standard operating procedure, or if it seems to be a faulty battery?

Lenovo support themselves don't know. They'll replace it, but can't confirm if the same issue will be present or not.

I have the 27++ slice battery and do not experience such behavior. Yours might be a faulty one.

So just to be sure we are on the same page: You can put your W to sleep with the 27++ slice battery attached. Then remove the battery while it is sleeping, and the W will stay alseep and not lose power completely?

Thanks,

My GOODNESS. I did exactly what you instructed and I DID lose the power completely!!!
I too confirm it's a hardware bug!!!

Well that's disappointing. That means this is an inherently flawed and poorly designed accessory. It also probably means we have very little chance for getting this fixed, as it appears to be how they intended it to work. Why, I can't possibly imagine.

So, it is now official. The slice battery is totally useless, at least for my use. Very disappointing indeed.

Some good news here. Lenovo published a new BIOS update to resolve this specific issue:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-74858

Well that looks quite promising. I can't wait to get back in town to apply the update and see if it works. I don't have the slice battery with me as in it's current state of operation it's just a huge paper weight. Not much good for traveling.

I'll post here when I find out if this update solves the problem

Thanks for the heads up.

I can confirm that the equivalent T510 BIOS update (1.43) fixed my problem!

It appears this BIOS update has in fact fixed the slice battery problem I was was experiencing and reported here.

Thank you Lenovo!

The release note of the latest BIOS update released today states clearly that the issue with the slice battery has been fixed.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 0#20110326

Because a release note clearly states it fixed something doesn't mean it does in all instances. In this instance I can confirm it does in fact fix it for me. Hopefully it does for everyone else affected with this problem. Again, thank you Lenovo!

There is one problem nagging me: if I have a secondary hard drive active in the UltraBay slot, it gets disconnected along with the Slice Battery 27++ whenever the battery is removed.

Has anyone experienced this before?

I have BIOS update 1.41 but still the problem.
I can reproduce it easily by doing the following steps:
1. connect the slice battery
2. put laptop (W510) into suspend
3. disconnect the battery again

Up to now everything is fine.

But when I am going to connect the laptop (it is still in suspend mode) to my docking station (step 4) it restarts at once.