ibook seems to eat battery

dmetzcher said:
Batteries with fuel gauge (laptops) should be calibrated by applying a deliberate full discharge once every 30 charges. Running the pack down in the equipment does this. If ignored, the fuel gauge will become increasingly less accurate and in some cases cut off the device prematurely.
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I have a question about the above guideline. What is considered a charge? When I know this, I can determine what 30 charges is, obviously, and then do the full discharge at that time, on a semi-regular basis.
 
dmetzcher said:
I have a question about the above guideline. What is considered a charge? When I know this, I can determine what 30 charges is, obviously, and then do the full discharge at that time, on a semi-regular basis.
Click to expand...
It simply means every time you charge your battery. So, every 30 times you charge it, do a complete discharge (i.e., use your laptop on battery power until it goes to sleep). You don't need to count every charge; if you do a recalibration (full discharge then full charge) once a month, as I previously mentioned, you'll be fine. And really, if you think about it, once every 30 charges averages out to about once a month (30 days), or close to it.
 
Amie said:
And really, if you think about it, once every 30 charges averages out to about once a month (30 days), or close to it.
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Good point. Wasn't thinking properly, I guess. LOL. Duh. Thanks.
 
I have an update to this post. I hope someone comes back and reads it...

On 2/4/06, my batter was 98% of original capacity.
Last night, on 2/15/06, it was 92%.

How does this happen. I have not been doing anything differently. The only thing that I did, when I noticed it, unplug my iBook to let the batter run down, so I could plug it back in and charge it over night. I noticed this drastic change while it was draining, and was at about 14% charge. I thought maybe it had something to do with the level of the charge, so I let it drain and put itself to sleep, and then plugged it back in and let it charge all night, which sleeping.

Is this normal? Is coconutBattery reporting things correctly?

Thanks!
 
coconutBattery is helpful here. If I remember Amie's thread about this correctly, it only runs on Tiger, though...

"once every 30 charges" is not entirely clear to me, either. Is it a charge if I disconnect the power from the notebook and connect it a minute later to recharge it from 99 to 100 percent? Or are they talking about charge-*cycles*, which are a different beast altogether. You can see how many full charge cycles your battery has gone through with coconutBattery or in System Profiler (the chapter about power management).
 
I'm using coconutBattery (on Tiger) to get the information. I just think it's strange because the battery, according to coconutBattery, was at 98% of original charge capacity two weeks ago, and has been that way for over two months. Then, this week, it;s at 92%. I just can't see how it can be correct. How could one lose an additional 6% of capacity in just two weeks, when nothing different has been done with the iBook? It's strange. So, either it was wrong before, and the battery was not at 98%, or it's wrong now, and it's not at 92%, I think.

Maybe I should email the coconutBattery developer and see what they think. I just think it's a bit strange, is all.
 
coconutBattery told me that my iBook had a 105% charge and that it was carrying 1.3 million volts.

I'm not sure I trust it to be 100% accurate.
 
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