i am wondering if i need to buy a new battery for my laptop, so heres my info on it: my laptop is a older model, a thinkpad a21e to be exact, and when i got it the battery life was around a hour or so, so i knew eventually i would have to get a new battery. and because i dont need to use the laptop at all really due to having my pc around at nearly all times until now with me in college and needing to travel and needing some kind of computing device, i would leave my laptop uncharged and unplugged for months at a time. but recently when i plugged it in, let it charge, it does not turn on. i push the power button, and i hear the HARD DRIVE kick up, but then the battery light flashes off, the hard drive dies down, and the battery life comes back on. does this mean that my battery is dead and can no longer even hold a charge, not even a running current charge? should i get a new battery? thank you for reading this and any responses i get are appreciated.

Your IBM laptop should be able to run off the AC adapter with or without the battery attached. Try this, Remove the battery from your IBM laptop > plug in the ac adapter > Turn it on. If that doesn't work, then something is wrong with the motherboard's power input.

You might find some help here http://forum.thinkpads.com/ I've seen some thinkpads that wouldn't even turn on with a bad battery. Some of those would respond after being plugged in for a few days. Others would work when a power supply matching battery voltage was substituted for the proper power supply. One of these was an a21. The owner bought a new battery and all was OK for about 3 months; then the motherboard died (pretty common on the a21's). At this point, a new laptop was the prudent fix. Skip