Pismo battery reconditioning

My PowerBook G3 Firewire (Pismo) has one of its two batteries that won't take a charge.
Ron Parsons wrote on :

My PowerBook G3 Firewire (Pismo) has one of its two batteries that won't take a charge. It has been in the right bay for a while and was getting used first so it has way more cycles than the other one.

One of the little freeware utilities reported numbers for max charge and actual charge that were in the thousands for the good battery, but less than 50 for the bad one.

The bad battery does discharge and recharge within this small range.

Apple has some utilities for such problems for the earlier PowerBooks but expressly says that they don't apply to the Pismo.

An Apple tech note said to run the bad battery down until the computer quit and then plug in the external power to recharge. I did that with only the bad battery installed and as in neared zero, the computer put itself to sleep and would not wake using the power button.

I left it on the charger overnight and nothing improved. Should I have left the computer sleeping until the battery was completely drained? I have no idea how long that might have taken.

I've also swapped the batteries into the opposite bays but that seems to make no difference.

Best online price for a Pismo battery that I've seen online is $139 and my local repair shop starts with $40 just for walking in the door.

Lewin A.R.W. Edwards replied on :

Apple has some utilities for such problems for the earlier PowerBooks but expressly says that they don't apply to the Pismo.

On the G-Books list, a user recently reported that putting his Pismo battery in a Wallstreet/Lombard (?) and running the battery fixer, repaired the battery NVRAM so that it now charges and runs on the Pismo again.

Due to the PowerBook's power management functions, it's not possible to "deep discharge" the battery except using a special utility, which Apple doesn't provide :/

Ben Gurion replied on :

Lewin A.R.W. Edwards larwe@redacted.invalid wrote:

On the G-Books list, ..

Where can one find that list?

John Johnson replied on :

In article Pine.OSX.4.56.0308061128400.3854@redacted.invalid, Obfus Kataa vapaa@redacted.invalid wrote:

On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 about 23:15 -0000 UTC John Johnson wrote:

johajohn AT indianahoosiers DOT edu

Remove the adjective to reply. Indiana is a noun. -----------^^^^^^^^^----------------------^^^^^^ | | You misspelled 'noun.' You misspelled 'an adjective.'

My mistake. I was (incorrectly?) taught that a noun was (roughly) a "person, place, or thing." Indiana is certainly a place. Adjectives, as I understand them, describe or modify a noun. "Indiana" does not describe "Hoosier." Quite the reverse, in fact, as "Hoosier" is just a person from Indiana. As it happens, the phrase "indiana Hoosier" is redundant, if not ungrammatical, as there aren't Hoosiers from anywhere else.

Functionally, the word "Indiana" is an adjective in the phrase "Indiana Hoosier." Just as "ant" is an adjective in "ant farm.">

I would have thought that "ant" was an adjectival noun, but I must admit that I'm not as good at grammar as I would like.

In any event, the goal was to obfuscate my e-mail address while enabling people to send me e-mail. As this objective has clearly failed, I will change my scheme. Hopefully the new terminology will be more successful.

Thanks for pointing this out! I can't imagine how many people besides yourself were unable to send e-mail to me as a result of the confusion resulting from my mislabeling.

Ben Gurion replied on :

Dan K macSNIPdan@redacted.invalid wrote:

Using Battery Reset on a Lombard ... nice if Battery Reset would run on a Pismo

I've poked around in Battery Reset's code trying to come up with a hack to allow it to run on Pismo, but have had no joy so far.

Did you try any of those utilities that fake a machine's gestalt code, like Wish i were or others?

Dan K replied on :

I wrote:

Using Battery Reset on a Lombard ... nice if Battery Reset would run on a Pismo

I've poked around in Battery Reset's code trying to come up with a hack to allow it to run on Pismo, but have had no joy so far.

Ben Gurion invalides.spam.grab@redacted.invalid wrote:

Did you try any of those utilities that fake a machine's gestalt code, like Wish i were or others? Yep, I used GestLab which can spoof most any gestalt selector, including of course 'mach'.

and Lewin Edwards larwe@redacted.invalid wrote:

There was some utility - I forget what it was - that only ran on the non-PPC-upgraded PowerBook 520. I patched it to work on the upgraded 520 just by searching every CODE resource for the non-upgrade Gestalt ID and replacing with the upgrade. It worked... mind you I don't know what other things happened :) That's about all I figured I'd be up against, however . . .

Pismo is a NewWorld machine, where Gestalt returns a generic value. you point to my problem. 'mach' just returns the generic New World 406 value in both Pismo and Lombard, so I'm pretty darn sure that ain't the selector it's using.

Oh well, I gave it my best shot. If anyone out there wants to take a krak at it I'll be happy to send you any Macsbug output you might need.

Dan K