I understand about battery problems, but let’s get real here. 2 months with no lockouts and no problems…

I terminated the process mentioned above and I’m running just fine…the only side effect I can see is that the battery indicator on the laptop is blinking, not steady.

On the other hand, Sony did lose about half a billion dollars recalling explosive laptop batteries over the past couple of years, so they’ll probably claim they’re just being careful in this case.

Amit Takin
http://www.techbaba.com/faqs/laptop+question+answers.aspx

Don’t have a fix – reverse engineering is a possibility but it might be a bigger can of worms that it seems. Having recently dealt with the engineering of a high heat generating electronic system, risking a laptop fire to save a few bucks would NOT be on the top of my list. On the other hand if you can’t even use a Sony battery on Linux then “those is fighting words”…

You might be able to argue antitrust, but the printer industry has been doing similar things with mixed legal results – nothing that can be considered a slam-dunk against this practice. It’s also pretty common in other more subtle ways in plenty of other industries as well.

Some background on battery technology. There are a great variety of technologies that are similar but differ in terms of their discharge curves (graphs of voltage and current vs. time). Replacing batteries can be a tricky thing because the batteries for portable use these days are running on the ragged edge and you must match battery chemistry to application duty cycle carefully. This often means tailoring your hardware design (specifically the power condition/distribution circuits) to a specific battery chemistry and even battery vendor and model. Mismatching the two can make lithium rechargeables in particular literally catch fire. There’s an excellent article about this in EDN (an electrical engineering trade mag)

http://www.edn-europe.com/newbatterytechnologiesholdpromiseperilforportablesystemdesigners+article+149+Europe.html

So based on this, realize that Sony could argue with some justification in court that they are simply providing a necessary safety features to assure either compliance with safety laws and/or protect against liability. All they need to do is wave around pictures of “spontaneously combusted” laptop we’ve all seen in the last few years to create an open-and-shut case against you. If however you could show that the 3rd party battery is either of equivalent design or even is the same supplier and model as that used by Sony you could nullify this argument.

Yes, of course, they are also raking in a premium for it too. I used to work for HP and the only thing keeping the company afloat right now is the fact they make 5-20x more on the ink and paper supplies than on the entire rest of the inkjet printer margins. They push inkjets hard because they still have to pay licensing and/or outsource for laserjet hardware and cartridges technologies. Naturally that’s why you get inkjet printers for free with computers these days. Razors and razor blades.

I have to wonder with Sony being one of the luxury brands of PC (I’d place Apple and IBM/Lenovo in the same category of superior form-and-fit with premium price category) whether this could also be used against you in court – “if you can afford the the BMW you can afford the service and part cost”.