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.

Comments

How Old?

[dthable]

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.

Re:How Old?

[mjpaci]

I'm sorry, but that sounds like bullshit. We have around 500 laptops at our company with 400 of them being at least 2 years old. We've only replaced about 10 batteries due to "deadness" in the past year. Those 10 were for IBM 600 series laptops that are at least 2.5 years old.

Sometimes techs give answers just to make you go away.

--Mike

DATA PLEASE!!

[goombah99]

The details presented here are too sketchy to even be slighlty informative.

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

Knackered Batteries

[@madeus]

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 :)

Power Manager / Date Reset Connection

[seigel]

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

Re:I get 2 minutes of life from my battery

[rhombic]

You forgot:

'Doing it the "give me one off of the shelf, you stupid lackey" way gets you:'

4. Your new battery, in hand, with which you can walk out of the store and be up and running

While,
"By using the in-place service system and channels, the customer gets:"

4. A multi-day (or multi-week) wait for a part that they can see sitting on the shelf in plain view!

This is called annoying customers who will go to another provider the next time they need a machine.

Retailers need to choose how highly they value customer loyalty vs. the ease of using the aforementioned channels. If a retailer makes me wait days to replace a defective item when I know that they have it in stock "for the showroom", I can personally guarentee I would never, ever use that retailer again, and tell all my friends about the experience.

Re:10.2.4 kiling battery life

[krswan]

I have a 16 station iBook lab (purchased last summer) in my classroom and have been having battery problems that started before 10.2.4 - I replaced 2 batteries through Applecare already, and have 3 more that need it now too. These last three started haveing problems before I upgraded. I wonder if the real problem is hardware, and the timing of these failures is just being associated with the OS updates.