The site lists some 'official' hardware, the simplest of which seems to be that CP2112, which I managed to find fairly cheap on Ali, but I wonder if it can be done some other way.

Without it, the software just says 'No adapter found' and doesn't even start so I can at least look at the GUI. It looked promising enough to give it a try, but then I realised I have no idea how to connect up to the battery.the official site, as well as some videos I found, show some sort of adapter that does this. Apparently it can be reprogrammed to reset the battery to factory conditions, so I did some digging and found this software BE2Works which supposedly does the job. How can it do that ? I did a bit of research and found that there's a little controller chip on that board there - the BQ20z in my case which I pictured there - which is responsible for this. Measured the 3 sets of cells afterwards and sure enough they all read the same 3.7v, so the pack itself was fine.what gives ? Turns out the laptop refuses to run on battery if the battery itself tells it it's past its due, even though the cells are fine. I applied 11v to the ends of the pack, limited to 1a from my power supply and charged them up for several hours. I popped the battery open and found the 6 cells. Unfortunately the battery is totally dead, not that you'd expect otherwise for a laptop this old, so I wanted to mess around with it and see if I can replace some of its cells to at least allow me to move it from one room to the other without having to shut it down every time I have to pull the adapter.

8Gb of RAM and a modest i5 CPU on it - worth saving. I recently managed to score a Samsung NP300E5C laptop which was sold as defective, so I took the gamble and turns out all that was wrong with it was a broken power jack, so it was a snap to get it going again.

Be2works lpt version