In article Xyakers-0212030706540001@redacted.invalid, Xyakers@redacted.invalid (frank malinowski) wrote:
I have a PBG4Ti400 and the original battery was getting a bit weak after two years so I got a new backup a few months ago. The newer battery worked fine for a while but now is looking quite dead (0% Charge) Are there any tricks to try to "restore" it?
Peter Renzland recently posted a scheme here which has really helped out my TiBook's battery. Quoting from one of his messages:
In Terminal: ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n battery -w0 | grep Bat Please note the Capacity before you do anything.
Fully charge the battery
turn off/down everything and run nothing, turn display right off and unplug it. (first set sleep to never) LEAVE IT ALONE until it force-sleeps
plug in and charge fully (after about 5 minutes, check the Capacity.
I've done this twice so far; the reported capacity has gone from 801 to 1825. I plan to try it again tonight and see if further improvement is possible. And it seems to be "real", as in, the battery actually does last longer, it's not a case of corrupting the reported capacity or something. However, mine was never as dead as yours is, so I'm not certain it'll work in your case. It seems that (for reasons not clear to me) it's important when doing this to drain the battery slowly, so take step #2 seriously.
In article tph-5F0A49.10423002122003@redacted.invalid, Tom Harrington tph@redacted.invalid wrote:
In article Xyakers-0212030706540001@redacted.invalid, Xyakers@redacted.invalid (frank malinowski) wrote:
I have a PBG4Ti400 and the original battery was getting a bit weak after two years so I got a new backup a few months ago. The newer battery worked fine for a while but now is looking quite dead (0% Charge) Are there any tricks to try to "restore" it?
Peter Renzland recently posted a scheme here which has really helped out my TiBook's battery. Quoting from one of his messages:
In Terminal: ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n battery -w0 | grep Bat Please note the Capacity before you do anything.
Fully charge the battery
turn off/down everything and run nothing, turn display right off and unplug it. (first set sleep to never) LEAVE IT ALONE until it force-sleeps
plug in and charge fully (after about 5 minutes, check the Capacity.
I've done this twice so far; the reported capacity has gone from 801 to 1825. I plan to try it again tonight and see if further improvement is possible. And it seems to be "real", as in, the battery actually does last longer, it's not a case of corrupting the reported capacity or something. However, mine was never as dead as yours is, so I'm not certain it'll work in your case. It seems that (for reasons not clear to me) it's important when doing this to drain the battery slowly, so take step #2 seriously.
Will this work for a Lombard whose battery is getting weird??
Cheers,
Bob S
In article Bob_S-2171A0.17010802122003@redacted.invalid, Bob Shutts Bob_S@redacted.invalid wrote:
Will this work for a Lombard whose battery is getting weird??
If the Lombard has a Lithium Ion battery, like on the PBG4, then probably yes. Otherwise I don't know.
In Terminal: ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n battery -w0 | grep Bat Please note the Capacity before you do anything.
Fully charge the battery
turn off/down everything and run nothing, turn display right off and unplug it. (first set sleep to never) LEAVE IT ALONE until it force-sleeps
plug in and charge fully (after about 5 minutes, check the Capacity.
Quite a few people have reported that the above works. Just to show the alternative point of view, I have tried this with my father's iBook Dual USB 500, whose battery has a reported capacity of about 500 units... it has made no difference.
(Also, doing Apple's battery reset trick hasn't worked. Neither has the reset-nvram/reset-all trick, because the CD combo drive is stuffed & I can't book from the original OS9 CD in the final step.)
Kwan.
In article 1g5gsh6.1uasuk8p110cgN%UseNet@redacted.invalid, UseNet@redacted.invalid (Kwan Yeoh) wrote:
In Terminal: ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n battery -w0 | grep Bat Please note the Capacity before you do anything.
Fully charge the battery
turn off/down everything and run nothing, turn display right off and unplug it. (first set sleep to never) LEAVE IT ALONE until it force-sleeps
plug in and charge fully (after about 5 minutes, check the Capacity.
Quite a few people have reported that the above works. Just to show the alternative point of view, I have tried this with my father's iBook Dual USB 500, whose battery has a reported capacity of about 500 units... it has made no difference.
That's interesting to hear. You did actually make sure to turn off/shut down everything you could in step 2 above? It seems a slow drain is crucial to success, though I'm not sure why. I say that because I at first tried just leaving the PB unplugged while I did normal work, running it until forced sleep, and that did not help. Another thing-- there's a limit to how high you can get the battery, and it might just be that yours is already in bad enough shape that 500 is the limit.
My experience (with a 550MHz TiBook) has been: Initial capacity was given as 810, which gave me a little more than a half hour of battery use. I tried the above process repeatedly-- and the reported capacity went to 1313, then 1825, and finally 2337. That seems to be the limit-- I tried again last night and got no higher.
I don't usually run this Mac on battery power. But yesterday I ran the PB on battery for about 80 minutes, at which time I still had 43% of capacity left. That's not as good as it was when new, but it's a hell of a lot better than the half hour max I was getting last week.
I'm getting similar results with my wife's laptop, but I don't know what the upper limit will be on it yet.
In article tph-1450B3.12012204122003@redacted.invalid, Tom Harrington wrote:
It seems a slow drain is crucial to success, though I'm not sure why. I say that because I at first tried just leaving the PB unplugged while I did normal work, running it until forced sleep, and that did not help.
I suspect that the only thing that can be measured directly is the voltage. After writing the logging program, I saw a pattern of high load / voltage drop / coma-sleep. I would guess that the firmware tries to integrate load over time to estimate charge, and when it thinks it's low, a load surge causes a voltage drop that triggers coma-sleep.
When running with minimal load, it will deplete to practically "empty", perhaps 4mAh, and then continue running on "empty" for maybe another 40 minutes or more.
Perhaps someone familiar with the firmware design might want to comment on this?
-- Pete
Tom Harrington tph@redacted.invalid wrote:
- Fully charge the battery
- turn off/down everything and run nothing, turn display right off and unplug it. (first set sleep to never) LEAVE IT ALONE until it force-sleeps
- plug in and charge fully (after about 5 minutes, check the Capacity.
That's interesting to hear. You did actually make sure to turn off/shut down everything you could in step 2 above? It seems a slow drain is crucial to success, though I'm not sure why. I say that because I at first tried just leaving the PB unplugged while I did normal work, running it until forced sleep, and that did not help. Another thing-- there's a limit to how high you can get the battery, and it might just be that yours is already in bad enough shape that 500 is the limit.
I wonder if it matters what OS your are using. Perhaps one OS uses more battery than another, or affects the battery in some other way. I failed the above on a machine with OS X.1.x.
Kwan.