Powerbook battery life

Viro

Viro

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My Powerbook's battery life seems to be dwindling. I used to get somewhere from 2:45 to 3:30 on a single charge. Now I get about 2:20. After running the commands "ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo" in Terminal, I see that my capacity is only 3664, when it should be above 4000.

Now, what can I do to increase my Powerbook's battery life? I've tried recalibrating, but it still doesn't seem to do much. And this machine is only 10 months old :(
 
Viro said:
My Powerbook's battery life seems to be dwindling. I used to get somewhere from 2:45 to 3:30 on a single charge. Now I get about 2:20. After running the commands "ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo" in Terminal, I see that my capacity is only 3664, when it should be above 4000.
Click to expand...

Same here. There's another thread about "Battery Numbers" where people listed their capacity. My manual for my 15" PowerBook says that the battery capacity is 4600, the terminal command returns about 3700. I seem to about 2.5 hours of battery life. Sometimes it just dies without warning me, too. Long way off from the 3.5-4.5 hours listed on the box, which are unrealistic I know, but still... my P4 Gateway got better battery life. Guy at the Apple store said they'd swap it for me... if I ever get around to driving the hour away to the Apple store I'll swap it. I wonder if my poor battery life is connected to my USB ports not being able to power bus-powered drives while every other Apple laptop seems to power them just fine.
 
Thanks for the link. That was helpful :)

I guess my capacity is normal for a near year old battery. Ah well...
 
Did you recalibrate the battery? Log into single user mode and let it on for few hours. In that mode there are no powersaving options active. The battery will drain till the last drop. Now charge the battery over the night and it should be much better. You might consider resetting the PMU.
My powerbook battery is 1 year old and still I have around 3:40 hours duration. Had to recalibrate few times..
 
I've just drained by PB's battery. Now ioreg reports 3892 as the capacity! w00t!!!

Wonder if it'll keep on increasing if I keep doing the single user recalibration? Should I try?
 
Do it once more. If it doesn't change, then you are probably maxed out on it.
It is kinda like running fsck. You do it until it stabalizes.

However, I don't think it will really improve, but it may.
 
I think another recalibration is in order. I've reached 100% charge, and its still chargine. ioreg is reporting the capacity as 3892 but the current charge as 3970 (and increasing)!

Things are definitely looking up :)
 
Viro said:
I think another recalibration is in order. I've reached 100% charge, and its still chargine. ioreg is reporting the capacity as 3892 but the current charge as 3970 (and increasing)!

Things are definitely looking up :)
Click to expand...

Aren't you not supposed to constantly drain a lithium-ion battery? (since it has no 'memory')
 
Recalibrated again. ioreg now reports the battery's capacity as 3949 :) Plus, once the the 'current' field reached 0, the Powerbook still kept on going for 15 minutes. All in all, total rundown time has increased by 45 minutes from about 2 hours.

Yesssss. Trying it again tomorrow night.
 
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