ibook g4 battery questions

[jonathanbrilliant]

I have an ibook g4 and when the battery is full it only gets 40 minutes. I heard there is a way to reset the battery or to restore it or something any help with ibook battery, I hope i dont have to get a new one,last week I was getting 2 hours I can't believe it has changed that fast
thanks in advance for your help

[Mrious_be]

I'm using a G4 iBook also, and when the battery is fully charged it is saying i have about 4 hours to go.
This however drops faster than times goes by and i would say i have something inbetween 2,5 hours and 3 hours of battery time, and probably depending on how i use the computer.

I do not know of any way of resetting a battery, gosh that would actually be THE invention on batteries these days.
There is one thing though that you can do, and not just with the battery on the iBook but with every battery you use and feel it's giving lesser power than should.

Drain your battery completely, let the machine run until it really shuts down from itself (off course, don't forget to save your work).
After that, completely charge the battery, and i mean completely, give it long enough even when the icon already say it's fully charged.
Then... i would say do this again, drain it completely and charge it again.
Most people tend to use batteries for half or 75% and then charge them, just to be sure.
This is ok but this is not really well for the battery itself.

The modern batteries might be handling this better but i'm not sure honestly.

Hope it works, maybe others have different ideas and knowledge.

[Texas Mac Man]

Apple provided a utility called Battery Reset 2.0 for the G3 laptops.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60655
However, Battery Reset will only run on OS 8.1-9.x. There does not seem to be an OS X equivalent.

Here's some tips from other Mac laptop users.

Try some of these resets. First try zapping your PRAM. You can accomplish this by holding down Apple-Option-p-r on startup. Wait until you machine chimes three times, then let it finish booting.

Another thing you can try is to reset your nvram. To reset the nvram:

  1. Start the computer while holding down the Option-Apple-O-F keys
  2. The Open Firmware screen will appear.
  3. Type in the following exactly as they appear, pressing Return after each line:
     reset-nvram
     set-defaults
     reset-all
  4. Your machine will restart automatically.

One last thing you can try is to reset your Power Manager Unit.

[Paddy]

Um - Lithium Ion batteries, which is what all recent and current Mac laptops use, do NOT experience the so-called "memory effect" seen in earlier battery technologies. Discharging them fully and recharging them completely only has to be done once (when you first acquire the machine) - after that it's a waste of time and battery power. (See wikipedia entry below - or any other authority on battery technology)

Resetting the PMU - instructions for Powerbooks and iBooks:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=14449

How old is the iBook? Batteries don't last forever, unfortunately, and yours sounds very much like what I'm seeing with mine, in a 4-year-old TiBook. Fully charged and then boom - half an hour later almost nothing.

It's worth reading the Wikipedia entry on Li-Ion batteries, and particularly this section entitled "Disadvantages":

QUOTE

A unique drawback of the Li-ion battery is that its life span is dependent upon aging from time of manufacturing (shelf life) regardless of whether it was charged, and not just on the number of charge/discharge cycles. This drawback is not widely publicized.
At a 100% charge level, a typical Li-ion laptop battery that is full most of the time at 25 degrees Celsius or 77 degrees Fahrenheit, will irreversibly lose approximately 20% capacity per year. However a battery stored inside a poorly ventilated laptop, may be subject to a prolonged exposure to much higher temperatures than 25 °C, which will significantly shorten its life. The capacity loss begins from the time the battery was manufactured, and occurs even when the battery is unused. Different storage temperatures produce different loss results: 6% loss at 0 °C/32 °F, 20% at 25 °C/77 °F, and 35% at 40 °C/104 °F. When stored at 40% charge level, these figures are reduced to 2%, 4%, 15% at 0, 25 and 40 degrees Celsius respectively.
This makes Li-Ion batteries unsuitable for back-up applications compared to lead-acid batteries, and even to Ni-MH batteries.
Because the maximum power that can be continuously drawn from the battery depends on its capacity, in high-powered (relative to C, battery capacity in A·h) applications, like portable computers and video cameras, rather than showing a gradual shortening of the running time of the equipment, Li-Ion batteries may often just abruptly fail.

Given that my Ti is now entering its 5th year, I guess 30 minutes of battery power is to be expected!! Argh. Oh well - guess it's battery-shopping time soon.

[Mrious_be]

hmmm... interesting.
And so i learn....

[Parker]

http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/
download this app

it'll show you how much life your battery still has in it out of what it originally had.


The bottom section tells you how much of a beating your battery has took.


Hope this helps (a little...)
-Parker

[daryl66]

Good catchParker.  I just found out that my 24 month old 12 inch PB has 98 Percent of it's  original life.

Daryl

[Parker]

np anytime