iBook G4 battery life

StarLee

Registered
Is it true that to extend the battery life I should never shut it down and keep it on sleep while I dont use it?

anyone know how to preserve the battery on ibook?

thanks!!!!!!
 
I don't think putting it to sleep instead of shutting it down preserves much energy. Well, booting and shutting down involves quite a bit of harddrive, but it depends on how long it'll be 'off' or 'asleep', really.

Why you _would_ put it to sleep instead of shutting it down, however, is a practical reason: It's much faster to wake up than to boot. In fact, it takes about zero seconds to wake-up from sleep, while it takes between 30 seconds and two minutes to boot the machine (depending on login items etc.) or five minutes until you've reopened your projects and working environments etc.
 
Anyone knows that any laptop battery has a shelf life. Apple's battery is top notch though. Compare it to any pc laptop (cuz those things degrades much faster). I don't know if I could say much about centrino laptops - those things could last up to 4-5 hrs!
 
drustar said:
Anyone knows that any laptop battery has a shelf life. Apple's battery is top notch though. Compare it to any pc laptop (cuz those things degrades much faster). I don't know if I could say much about centrino laptops - those things could last up to 4-5 hrs!

i had a pc laptop from '99 till the end of '02. in the beginning it had 3 hours of battery life. in the end when i sold it, it still had 3 hours of battery life. and i had used it a lot.

ibook instead.. in the beginning it had 5 hours of life. in 8-9 months it lasted 30 minutes, then 10-15 minutes.. untill i got the replacement battery (which kept its life till the end).

no wonder im now so paranoid about the batteries.. :rolleyes:
 
I think I turned mine off overnight once in 2002... other than that, it's been on the entire time since about a month after the white ibooks were released, save only brief moments for reboots and the like.

My battery life was decent in Jaguar. Then came the battery update, which made it much better. Or at least it said it was. Then I installed panther and it now tells me I have 2 hours instead of 4. I haven't actually tested how long the battery lasts, though, I tend to keep it plugged in much of the time.

edit: Of course, when I bought it in the first place they were advertising 5 hours of battery life, which it never ever got in OSX (though the few times I booted to OS9 it gave that as a projection if the battery was fully charged)
 
Yep, OS 9 has much better battery management. Mostly because it lacks decent memory management, though. ;-) The new OS just _does_ more most of the time than OS 9 did, which ends up using more power (processor & harddrive, mostly). However, I've found battery life to increase with the Battery Update in Panther. Dunno why it would drop with installing Panther.

You might want to try one or both of the following things...

1.) Reinstall. Clean.

2.) Drain battery and recharge. A few times.

You can also search Apple's support pages for "iBook" and "battery". You'll find some tips.
 
I doubt the life decreased. I think the thing that measures it is wonky. It doesn't seem to go down as fast as it should.
And the panther was a clean install.
 
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