Slashdot Mirror
10.2.4 Killing Battery Life
Milanek writes "The iBook/PowerBook battery seems to be permanently incapacitated by the 10.2.4 update.
" I had this problem as well - had to get my battery replaced last week. It was a painless exchange, but still annonying.
"incapacitated"... batteries... capacitance... hehehehe!
:-)
do tell - was that an intentional pun?
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
The /. summary makes it sound like all Power/iBooks are experiencing battery drainage after updating to 10.2.4 - my 2002 600 mHz iBook updated just fine, and battery life is the same.
I was talking with our computer techs at work about this situation and he told me that since my battery is a year old, that it's normal (for all laptops) that they need to be replaced. If the battery is around a year, I don't see how you can blame the 10.2.4 update.
I swapped my new laptop battery for an older one that was working a-okay. The old one, although reporting full charge, was run down to absolute flat in about an hour. I charged it again overnight and retried and after a few tries it runs flat now in under 30 mts. So i swapped back to my new battery which is lasting me a good 3 hrs or so. I was happy to blame the old battery (it was made in 2000) but it does seem odd that this behaviour should coincide with upgrading to osx10.2.4 - and so many others are also reporting this problem now.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Battery Reset is well-hidden on Apple's Download site Yeah, it's for iBook/PBG3, but who knows ....
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
My 600MHz Late 2001 iBook is affected. Since I installed 10.2.4, I've had the "reserve battery" dialogue appear after 15 minutes or so.
My girlfriend's iBook's battery was replaced under AppleCare a few months ago due to poor battery life, and now the new battery's doing exactly the same thing it did months ago... we went from around 2:30 to 3hrs of life down to 1hr after a full charge. Argh! What the hell is wrong with these computers that cause this?!
Frustrating yes, but at least we've still got a little more time left on AppleCare. I might as well make a call for a replacement again.
I have a 12" PB 867Mhz -- I see no difference since 10.2.4.. I get 3 hours with full brightness and full performance, and upto 4 hours with brightness at 25% and reduced performance. It always charges to 100% and the amber light turns green.
I doubt this is a software issue.
People seem to complain about battery life after every update. Remember how people said battery life is reduced with Jaguar (10.2)?
What model type and age is your powerbook or ibook (and how old is the battery, if different). What makes you think you are not just imaginging this?
Does the energy saver control panel time/% agree with the one in the menu bar?
When your battery is nearly empty, how many lights does the battery show when you press the button on it
How long a life (uninterupted by sleep or screen dims)are you observing when using the stock (not custom) power-saver setting. Is your airport on or off. do you have any accessories plugged in?
is it reproducible or intermittent. have you found a workaround?
Come on folks, if you read slash dot you can do a proper bug report
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I did have one problem with 10.2.4 on my TiBook (fall 2001) - my Olympus D3000 camera won't connect anymore since the update (no problems on my wife's iMac 17", though - so I'm using it there for now). No problems with battery life that I've noticed, though I usually operate tethered. The couple of times I've had the TiBook off it's leash, the discharge curve seemed normal - roughly 25% discharge in an hour. That's about what I've gotten since Jaguar. It sucked power much worse under 10.1x.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
My battery is just over a year old, and I haven't noticed anything unusual since moving to 10.2.4. I'm pretty hard on my battery, too - never shut down except to reboot after upgrades, rarely take my battery below 50% charge.
Hope it doesn't happen to me...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
My PowerBook G4 battery won't go beyond '84%' charged now.
:/
:)
While this may well be an 10.2.4 issue, I'm thinking it's very more likely to be due to the age of the battery (I've had my origional G4 'Book for 2 years now and I've been overdue for a replacement for a while).
Now guessing randomly.........
Caution: Just blowing smoke out my ass...
It seems unlikley but it *may* be that 10.2.4 is reporting the charge of the battery more correctly than previous releases? Could it actually be highliting that your battery charge is not as high as it should be if it was a new battery?
Or is that bullshit?
(Don't ask me, I'm just a software monkey
The catch is... it was (and is) still running 10.2.3. For us, that upgrade seemed to have triggered the problem.
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
I had this happen to me over the course of about a year and a half. Went from 3.5-4 hours of battery life down to literally 10 minutes on a full "charge."
After asking around, reading up on the web, I found that not using your battery often, but leaving it in, can cause this. That is, most of the time, I use my iBook at my desk on AC and for a while, very rarely had it running on battery. I bought another battery and have been making sure to run the battery down and haven't run into the problem- but even if I were going to, I don't think it'd start for a few more months.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Everything I've ever seen says that discharging a battery all the way down to zero (or near-zero) can be bad for it (i.e. shorten its life due to complete draining), so this is why I try not to do that on my PowerBook's battery, which is 3 years old, and still gives me ~2hrs of life.
I constantly have it plugged into AC, with the battery in. I wonder if iBooks are different. I would imagine that the battery's life would be severely shortened if the iBook tried to keep charging it even after it had reached 100% charge. But, that doesn't explain why this problem started with the 10.2.4 update.
I just got a new TiBook 15, 1GHZ, OSX 10.2.4. A week after I got it, I was using the battery power and around 80% the screensaver came on right in the middle of my work! Then minutes later the laptop went to sleep (also in the middle of my work). No questions asked, apple replaced the battery (overnight I might add), could the problem be defective batteries?
After reading some posts, I was wondering if anyone sees the relationship between the date reset problem reported when people upgrade to this release (10.2.4) and the Power Manager, which when reset causes the date to be reset as well?
thoughts?
Cheers
Heck, I don't even have 10.2.4 and ran into the problem we're talking about. Looking at the comments, it sounds like most people aren't running into 10.2.4 problems with their batteries.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Well, we weren't running 10.2.4 the first time this happened. I think my gf's battery was still running one of the 10.1 releases.
Sounds like hardware issue, to me.
Yeah, my 600MHz iBook (2002) went from 3 hours to about 1:30 hours. There is no way I'm paying for a fix. I'm demanding a replacement from Apple.
I've noticed tons of more problems with my FireWire HD, Combo Drive, and 20GB HD since updating. Specifically, I can't burn CDs anymore, transferring files to/from HD/FireWire HD oftem comes up with "Sorry, unexpected error...". I recently bought a AirPort and that fried (I could smell smoke) on me. This is starting to really bug me.
My 9 month old iBook (OS 10.2.4) now only works for about 2 minutes with the battery. It has progressively gotten worse over the last 2 months to the completely unportable way it is now.
The local Apple shop won't just exchange the battery; they have to order it from Apple as it is a warranty issue. What a pain, especially now that they are 3 days beyond when they told me it would be in.
I like everything else about my machine but this battery issue really sucks.
I just got my PowerBook battery replaced, and this was the situation:
Charge to 100%
Unplug
At about 70%, the battery would instantaneously go to zero and sleep.
Rinse and repeat.
However, what the article *seems* to describe is batteries not charging fully, or batteries with reduced lifespan.
My new replacement battery has a lifespan of 4 hours and 20 minutes
My old spare battery has a lifespan of 3 hours and 40 minutes
The dead replaced battery had a lifespan of about 20 minutes before dropping to zero, even though it reported a full charge.
Is this what others are seeing? The 10.2.4 problem doesn't seem to sound like any of these. The new battery is fine, the spare battery just sounds old, and the dead battery sounds like it was broken.
GPL Deconstructed
I still get 2-3.5 hours off my original G4's battery. I do find the annoying fan noise has gotten louder over the years and the fan seems to run more, but battery life is still pretty close to the day one figures. Most lithium battery tech wants the batttery "topped off" frequently for maximum life (unlike some older NiCd technology). I've only deep discharged (below 20%) maybe 5-6 times. If you deep cycle your batteries, then expect periodic replacements. It is much better today than when 1-2 hours (if you were lucky) was enough to drain a laptop a few years back. Now I hook into the airplanes power when flying, the hotels when I travel, the cars when driving... And obviously the houses when home. As the battery technology gets better look for easily removable ones to disappear. (My cell phone/pda does not have an externally replaceable battery already.)
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Lithium Ion batteries can be recharged about 500 times maximum.
that is almost certainly the net sum total of the problem.
Later . . . . . . WebBug
These claims seem to crop up everytime Apple releases a new update to OS X. I remember reading the exact same claims when 10.2.3 was released, in the Apple support forums.
Lithium Ion batteries (the type used in the iBook/TiBook) simply don't last very long. Best estimates I've heard is 300-500 charge cycles. Depending on how often you charge your battery, its easy to go through this problem.
I had awful problems with my iBook battery, after only 5 months. In a matter of weeks, it went from 4 hours of battery life to under an hour. But when I did the math out, my estimated charge cycles in those 5 months was around 400.
Nothing to do with the OS update...just a battery at the end of its life. Good thing it was still under warrenty...after a few calls to Apple tech support I got a new battery.
Yeah, you. Aren't you wishing you could easily go back to 10.2.3, with which there was nothing wrong, and from which you had no reason to upgrade?
You wouldn't be if you had listened to me.
Techs ALWAYS give answers just to make you go away. And of course, it's bullshit.
I have an ibook-500
Much to my dismay:
voltage=12236 flags=5/0x005 amperage=1200 capacity=219 current=214 [97.7%]
Don't have time to register, hence the anonymous thing...
s .
I work for a school district as the Apple Service technician, and I've seen a sudden upsurge of batteries needing to be replaced of late... I've noticed a few things:
1) Our batch of iBook (dual USB) batteries seem to be slowly giving up the ghost after being in service for about 14 months - for example, my own personal machine from this batch will work fine till about 50% (with brightness all the way up) or 30% (with brightness down to 1 bar) before it suddenly drops into sleep mode - no warning whatsoever. Other problems seen include a battery that will only charge while computer is shut down or in slee and one battery that registered 100% charge but would completely die after 10 minutes of use.
2) Our newer iBook (16VRAM) machines are doing similar things but much quicker. These machines have only been in service since September!
3) Except my own personal machine (which is 10.2.4), all these iBooks are running under 10.1.5.
Finally, battery charge can be very subjective and time consuming to trace down... I saw a link to a little app, X-Charge, which simply graphs your battery charge - very handy for charting your battery life. Link is http://www.pol-online.net/index.php?page=freeware
Anyway, that's my 2 cents, hopefully it helps a bit.
Jeff
those that performed the 10.2.3 --> 10.2.4 update are now complaining about modem issues, battery problems
those that performed the "combo" update 10.2 --> 10.2.4 don't seem to have any of these problems
I wish people would mention WHICH update they performed
I did the "combo" update on my iBook and have had zero problems so far.
With which there was nothing wrong?
Oh, PLEASE. I mean, yes, I *like* MacOS X, but it's kind of a hard sell, convincing me that there was nothing wrong with 10.2.3. And I'm not saying that just to be annoying... there are a bunch of things that annoy me about X, and I installed 10.2.4 hoping that some of them would be fixed. A couple of them were, neither of which were on the list.
(An example: there was an issue where a feature I requested a year ago, dragging files or folders into standard nav services dialog boxes would select that file (for open boxes) or the location of that file/folder (for save boxes). They implemented it as of either 10.2 or 10.2.1, but it didn't work in a number of cases, including mounted disk images. Now it does.)
It also, as has been pointed out before, included several security fixes.
The updates have lots of little fixes, and tend in the direction of making things work better. I like that tendancy, so I install them. You can ignore them if you like, but don't tell us that updating is dumb. This is not MS... for every one thing Apple breaks in an update, they tend to fix dozens.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
For the record, I'm getting less than 5 min of life on my battery (which I now use only because it still works for sleep). Now that I think about it, it has been progressing this way since after upgrading to 10.2.4.
Any hope for a software fix? My trusty Wallstreet never had this problem.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I'm typing this from my iBook dual USB (2001 500 MHz) on the original battery. I was about to buy a new battery until I saw this article because of recent rediculously short battery life I've been getting (30 mins or less) Well, I tried something after I saw this article and, lo and behold, I've been running on 0% battery life (incl the green LED's) for the past 30 minutes. I'd be curious to know how many of those who report very short battery life have tried going beyond the system warning... cause mine is still running.
okay. i'm seeing several comments about battery life and that liion batteries should be treated differently from nicad and nimh batteries.
i know in nicad days, it was best to let them run down and then charge them fully. from my experience with cell phones and nimh batteries, that's a relatively good idea there with them too, although their propensity to develop memory was weaker.
but, what's best with modern liion batteries? should i keep my laptop on the charger whenever possible? let it run down to xx% and then charge it? is there a difference in how i should treat them in my cell phone vs. my laptop?
geek friendly VPS's and free API enabled DNS : zerigo.com
Let's do it your way:
..."
/those./"
/that/ stuff.
/complain to the source of the delay./ Getting uppity with the local shop puts an extra step in between that and your complaint getting to the manufacturer (yes, a good shop will bitch to the manufacturer when they can't get parts on time, don't worry about that ;-)) ... It also will get you an annoyed sales or service department.
;-)
Guy: "My battery isn't working right."
Dude: "Okay, lemme check it in and check it out for you."
Dude does his diagnosis. Battery is hosed. Replace battery, Dude says. Guy comes back the next day.
Dude yanks one off of the shelf.
Guy goes home.
Dude's internal service report reads: "Replaced battery with one from the shelf."
Dude: "Hey, Ordering Man, I replaced that Guy's battery with one of the twenty you ordered from the distributor instead of getting one specially shipped in from the manufacturer."
Ordering Man: "Okay, I'll pay our distributor with the reimbursement from the manufacturer."
Dude: "The manufacturer doesn't reimburse us for the warranty repair when they don't send us warranty parts. I mean, who would? They don't have any way to know for sure that we actually ordered something and did a repair."
Ordering Man: "So how do I pay our distributor?"
Dude: "Normally, we don't pay for the batteries we replace under warranty."
Ordering Man: "Where do you normally get your batteries?"
Dude: "The manufacturer. Is that a problem?"
Ordering Man: "Not as long as we pay our distributor."
Why does this sound like an episode of Bastard Operator from Hell? Because your "high and mighty, the customer should never understand that there are real people with real logistical problems on the other side of the counter" stance is just the kind of mindset that spawns classic BOFH stories.
Let's look at the scenario a little higher up the ladder.
Ordering Man: "Hey, Distributor Guy, we used three batteries as warranty replacements."
Distributor Guy: "What the fuck are you smoking? We pay the manufacturer for those! Where's our money for those!?"
Ordering Man: "You mean the manufacturer--"
Distributor Guy: "Of course not, you asshat! Do we look like a service provider? Where. Is. Our. Money."
Ordering Man: "We're keeping our customers irresponsibly happy!"
Distributor Guy: "And you're making our lawyers happy. Money, please."
Or from another angle:
Distributor Guy: "Here's our monthly invoices."
Manufacturer looks over the NET-30s.
Distributor Guy: "These ten thousand batteries here, they're warranty replacements. Please give us that money back."
Manufacturer: "You were talking about smoking crack earlier
Oh, wait!
It doesn't always work that way in retail! Sometimes, the person above you doesn't get paid until you sell things! (See Bungie's old Rant on how video games get shelf space for more goodies here.) So you might think that this solves the problems itself, right? On the contrary, it causes more!
So we have this scene instead:
Distributor Guy: "Here's our monthly invoices."
Manufacturer looks over the NET-30s.
Distributor Guy: "These ten thousand batteries here, they're warranty replacements. We don't need to pay you for
Manufacturer invoices Distributor, who is $100,000 short because of warranty replacements. Distributor, meanwhile, invoices all of those local shops doing replacements with store stock for that $100,000. Well, the local shops can't/don't/won't/shouldn't pay because the customer didn't pay anything--it was under warranty each time.
Local Shops say to Manufacturer, "Give us this money, so we can pay Distributor, who can then pay you!"
I won't even get into lines of credit and all of the messes that come with
How is this remotely good for you, the end-consumer? Is it really so hard to understand these kinds of logistical concerns from that side of the counter?
Seems like it. I have to explain this more and more these days, as people want EVERYTHING IN TWO SECONDS FLAT. They can't hold on to their machine while the new battery arrives and eliminates all of these problems (and thus, reducing your beloved shop and manufacturer's internal costs and troubles, IN TURN making your shit cheaper in the long and short run), because that just "isn't good customer service". I can't tell you how many times a loaner computer has been demanded of me because of a dispatch (mailed-in) repair or I'm repairing a machine that isn't functional. By your logic, I should just give the guy a new computer off the shelf!
Part of good customer service is the good customer. Someone once told me that, and it's the complete truth. In this world, you get what you give.
If you're upset with a shop's service, they DO have an obligation to make it right. If you're an asshole, making un-thought-out and unreasonable demands, they have the right to be human and watch you walk out of the door.
Instead of acting like a toddler and taking your toys home, if it takes more than a few business days to get that battery,
We're humans, Goddamnit. Treat us like we are, and understand that we don't like waiting a week for a part we should get overnight or within two business days, either. "Just give me one off of the shelf" is a more complicated imperative than it seems.
-/-
Mikey-San
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
One of the biggest disappointments for me when I went from a Firewire G3 PowerBook (don't remember all the code names) to an 867MHz G4 TiBook this past June was the dismal, by comparison, battery life.
3 0217044725215&query=battery) from Max OS X Hints, which some people think is a bad idea and others good. My result was about a 15 minute increase in the listed charge time, but I'm not sure if it actually added real world minutes. I do have two G4 batteries and both last about the same amount: 1-1/2 to two hours, which is really not long enough to be all that useful.
My G3 PB could easily get four+ hours of battery life when using apps and at least 3-1/2 when doing something really processor intensive like modifying PhotoShop files or watching a DVD (the latter seems to be the real killer). With the ability to put dual batteries in the bays (I loved those bays and miss them dearly!) I frequently worked all day (8 full hours) on battery life when not near an outlet. And, I never replaced either of my two batteries in the three years I used the G3.
My TiBook on the other hand gets MAYBE two hours of battery life, and that's on a good day. I've seen lots of stuff online about how to "extend" the life of a TiBook battery and recently tried this (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200
While I haven't had this particular issue with my iBook, its logic board promptly ate its self this weekend when I plugged in the AC adapter(no it wasn't surged.) I got an email from a freind with a similar experience this weekend also. While the iBook is a great laptop when it works I can't help but think in the PC world if batteries acted up like this, and logic board randomly failed we would be talking class action lawsuit not discussing it calmly on slashdot.
-sonic
My mother's iBook 2001 500, 10.2.3 -> 10.2.4, what appears to be a problem, the problem persists but seems lessened after resetting PMU.
I think I'll perform a clean installation and combo upgrade on the iBook tomorrow. :-[
Just chiming in with another data point:
My 1.5 year old TiBook 400 still gets 3 hours or so with full brightness. I generally only discharge down to 50% or so, but it's certainly been down to zero several dozen times.
This is much better than the Dell laptop I had in the past, which spent almost all of it's time plugged in but was only getting 30-45 minutes after a year of use. It also ran the fan intermittently while in standby, which never made much sense.
For those who posted above "you're totally wrong" or talked about battery cycles or whatever, this is an actual issue.
I have three PowerBooks (TiBook, Pismo, Wallstreet). The batteries of the three vary and at least one is, in fact, very new. After upgrading each to 10.2.4, I saw the exact same behavior, which was previously present in none of them.
- The reported battery life is about half what it was before the update was installed.
- If you work through the low power warnings, you'll be rewarded with a fair amount of life in them as the power meter reads 0%.
- At some point, the book will just sleep with no warning. No, this point isn't quite where you would have expected timewise -- it's not just the reporting of the available power that's at fault.
I've had a stack of powerbooks going back to the Powerbook 100. I still have a 520c -- if you want to talk about battery cell lifetime issues, that's the one to start with.
This is totally new behavior for each of the affected systems. The recent system update makes it a culprit, although it's very possibly something else.
I got a 15" PowerBook G4 a couple of months ago, with 10.2.3, and it had battery problems from the beginning. It would not charge above 96%, and the battery meter would report that it was calculating the time until it would be fully charged. I usually have the computer plugged in, so it went for weeks like that.
I started trying different things: draining the battery to near 0, resetting the PMU, booting into OS9, and charging with the machine powered off. I also upgraded to 10.2.4 around this time. It's maximum charge started to drop. First in the 60s range, then 30s, and 20s. When I finally drained the battery completely, it would not go above 0%.
I called Apple and had a replacement battery sent, which seemed to work fine at first. After a few days, the charge was at 97% and had been plugged in all that time. Before I called up Apple again (this time fearing the computer itself was defective), I decided to look it up in their online help database, and came across this, which says that in OS X, the battery is kept charged between 95 and 100%, and charges back up to 100% after going below 95%. This is for various PowerBook and iBook models running Mac OS X 10.0 and later.
I don't trust this very much, since I have never noticed this type of behavior on other laptops. It seems to work fine now though. If I power off, it charges back up to 100%, otherwise it seems to stay around 97%.
I tried something like that too. When my iBook dual usb 2001 battery was starting to run down faster and faster, I lowered the screen brightness to minimum and turned off all programs except bbedit. Lo and behold, it ran for hours even after it reached 0%.
My theory is that the battery is somehow not providing enough voltage to run the computer (or the computer is requiring more voltage than the battery can provide) which shuts itself down, even though its capacity is not terribly diminished.
I tried that again recently (now that my comp gets about 2 minutes of battery life) but it didn't work. My battery only shows a green flashing light on the bottom indicating it is empty.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
DOH! too little sleep and too much work make mez a dull (-witted) boy. While the Pismo does seem completely unaffected by the battery issue, I do have what may be a literally unique factor in play - when I work at the office, it's plugged into a Duo power adapter which powers the 'Book but will not charge the battery. I've worked at home a good bit recently and would expect to have been affected by the drainage issue, but the adaptor may be a factor. I may even use my other Duo adaptor at the house to be safe...
This article is a bit clueless... It would be helpful if it had even mentioned the possibility of Resetting the Power Management Unit.
The other thing is that it's quite normal for the battery to just sit at 97%, no matter how long you've left it plugged in for.
It's designed this way so that the battery isn't continually charging every time it's a little bit away from 100%. Recharging doesn't happen until the battery drops below 97%.
If this person had unplugged the power, let it drain the battery for a little while, and then plugged the power back in, it would have returned to somewhere between 97% and 100%.
i don't read slashdot anymore.
have a 667 tibook, get like 2.5-3 hours of battery depending on use ( or an hour and one cd burned with my external:) . i upgraded to 10.2.4 and haven't had a single complaint. even leave the airport card running non-stop.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
thank you for sharing this information. i could not otherwise find an indication the hardware-scope of this problem (some pmu issues in the past have been hardware-model-specific) since it's easy to assume most everyone running os_x is running 21st c. devices.
my story: running 10.2.3, my (4 year old) wallstreet battery went from ~2 hours of life per charge to dead one day a few weeks ago. i just bought a new battery, but now i'm afraid to use it until 10.3...would that there be a 10.2.5!
Battery wouldn't charge past 15% Switch PowerBook Off (Do not remove battery) Hold Down Shift+Ctrl+Alt & depress the Power button for 1 second let go then wait 5 seconds before powering up as normal... sorted.
The bash script spoken of in an earlier comment on this topic produces charge and capacity results in microamperes per hour (mAh). (The script's own creator did not know what units the numbers produced.)
This entry in their Knowledge Base gives you the initial capacity of each of Apple's batteries, out of the box, in amperes per hour. Given that information, you can determine what percentage of its original capacity your current battery has.
Also, XBattery allows you to track your battery's capacity over time, as well as a great deal of other battery-related information, in a nice GUI wrapper. It is freeware.
For what it's worth, my own results from the bash script are:
voltage=16666 flags=5/0x005 amperage=1200 capacity=3544 current=3538 [99.8%]
A fresh battery for my 14.1" iBook would hold a charge of 3.9 Ah, and thus my 3.544 Ah battery still has 91% of its original capacity.
Like an earlier poster, I am able to turn down the brightness on my screen to one notch away from darkness, turn off my AirPort card, and in doing so extend my battery life up to five hours or more. It's not the way I normally wish to work, but it's good to know. I had no idea that the screen's brightness level affected battery life so much.
X-Charge is freeware, but is not as fully featured as XBattery.
I don't suppose too many OS9 users spend much time at Slashdot.
I wonder if they're having the same experience.
That might tend to suggest bad batch of batteries, rather than bad OSX update. I wonder how much software control there is over battery charging. I'd have expected it to be under hardware control with software monitoring to retrieve current battery charge.
Of course, I don't know anything about hardware.
capacity = 1752.
Not happy at all.
Now wash your hands.
That's weird, my 12" iBook (32MB VRAM model) battery is also rated as 3.9 Ah, but my current maximum capacity is 4.192 Ah :) You won't hear me complaining about that though!
Donate free food here
I have a 2002 12" iBook 700mhz (16meg VRAM) -with the same problem.
. xUtUa pHfiHY.4@.3bbf6b95/131
I was having shortened battery life prior to upgrading to 10.2.4. But since upgrading my battery will charge to full in less than 20 minutes. The reported battery life will drop to zero in less than less than 20 minutes and the computer will go into deep sleep until plugged in again. The led lights on the battery however report full charge.
I did reset the power mangement unit, but it had not effect. I suppose I'll have the battery replaced, but I am afraid its a logic board problem.
There are a number of threads on Apple Support Discussion boards regarding these problems such as:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?13@92
I can report the following experience on a 15in 1Ghz
Powerbook G4:
After upgrading to 10.2.4 the battery life went down to 02:05 hrs while I used to get 03:45 under the same conditions.
Applecare suggested resetting the PMU (a liddle button -see their website on where this is) and the PRAM (hold opt-apple-P-R duing the boot and wait for 4 chimes). I did this, after draining the battery and just measured the battery life as being restored to 04:05 hrs!
I hope this info proves useful to people.
I don't know if this is of any help, but I found when reading through the literature that came with my new 12" PB that the battery requires "calibration." I've never noticed this requirement with a previous mac, but followed the instructions and have seen much better power management (than I experienced before I read this bit). Instructions for "calibrating" the 12" PB battery: charge 'till full (green light where charger connects to computer) use without plugging in until computer runs out of battery (goes into sleep). now plug in power cord and charge 'till full. apparently this only needs to be done once.
This is why I will definitely get AppleCare for my next Powerbook. Because (in my experience with my Pismo) Li-ion battery life sucks. Three years of AppleCare means at least two free batteries, right? :-)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
$ ioreg -p IODeviceTree -w 0 -n battery | grep oltaget y"=10000,
g e"=1200,"Capacity"=4050,"Current"=3867})
| | | "IOBatteryInfo" = ({"Voltage"=0,"Flags"=131,"Amperage"=1200,"Capaci
"Current"=0},{"Voltage"=12554,"Flags"=7,"Ampera
The bash script ends up doing this:
voltage=0 flags=131/0x083 amperage=1200 capacity=10000 current=0 voltage=12542 flags=7 amperage=1200 capacity=4050 current=3809 [0.0%]
And it's absolutely correct, too. My right battery bay, which contains a CD-ROM drive, has a 0.0% charge.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Bingo. I say for anybody using an Apple laptop... get AppleCare. It's well worth the money, in the long run.
I better get a new battery for that iBook before its AppleCare runs out (in May).