10.3.6 upgrade - battery problems

  1. On my last post I said that after an hour the battery was only 6% recharged. In the last couple of minutes it jumped to full charge!! That means it gradually charged for over an hour and then, in a couple of minutes, went from less than 10% to 100% charged.

    Robert B. Peirce, Venetia, PA 724-941-6883
    bob AT peirce-family.com [Mac]
    rbp AT cooksonpeirce.com [Office]

  2. Have you tried calibrating your battery?

    Charge fully, then discharge until coma sleep.
    Then charge fully.

    I recommend trickle-discharge (at minimum load --
    unplug everything, turn off airport, bluetooth, etc)
    turn display brightness to minimum
    best to reboot before starting discharge.

    Make sure you don't allow it to sleep.

    I like to monitor it -- consider getting

    X-Charge or XBattery

    at the very least, run

    /usr/sbin/ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n battery -w 0 | grep IOBatteryInfo

    and make a note of the Capacity.

    -- Peter

  3. I tried recalibrating.

    Unfortunately, it is impossible to prevent it from going to sleep. It will show full charge for 10-20 minutes and then suddenly shut down. Plugging the charger in at that point shows 0%.

    I will look into your software suggestions to see if they help.

    Apparently, this problem is hitting some laptops and not others.

  4. Do you have a second battery? If its doing the same thing with that one, then it might be a software issue. I've seen this exact behavior with dying or dead battery packs. In fact, I've got eight battery packs that will show full charge with the lights and in the machine with the charger, but give you five minutes of run time or less after you pull the plug. Now if I can find a cheap way to replace the Li-on cells...

    Grandpa Koca - SAHD for 6 - Keeper of the Perpetual Kindergarten

    My opinion is neither copyrighted nor trademarked. It is price competitive. If you like, I'll trade for one of yours.

  5. Previously, Grandpa Koca wrote:

    Do you have a second battery? If its doing the same thing with that one, then it might be a software issue. I've seen this exact behavior with dying or dead battery packs. In fact, I've got eight battery packs that will show full charge with the lights and in the machine with the charger, but give you five minutes of run time or less after you pull the plug. Now if I can find a cheap way to replace the Li-on cells...

    No, but this thing was working fine until I upgraded to 10.3.6, and at least two other users have run into the same problem. I guess it is possible that the battery started to fail exactly at the same time I upgraded to 10.3.6, but that seems to be stretching coincidences a bit much. OTOH, how would I know?

    Robert B. Peirce, Venetia, PA 724-941-6883
    bob AT peirce-family.com [Mac]
    rbp AT cooksonpeirce.com [Office]

  6. On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 19:27:09 -0500, Robert Peirce wrote (in a previous article):

    [snip]

    OTOH, how would I know?

    Go back to 10.3.5 and see if the problem disappears.

    Nelson

  7. How do I do that?

    Robert B. Peirce, Venetia, PA 724-941-6883
    bob AT peirce-family.com [Mac]
    rbp AT cooksonpeirce.com [Office]

  8. I think the answer is "with difficulty" :-(

    AIUI you have to archive your data, reinstall 10.3.x from your install CD then apply the 10.3.5 combo update and restore your data.

    --

    Peter

Power Manager - automation and energy saving software for Mac OS X

Download Power Manager and start saving.