Care and feeding of a powerbook battery

A

Alterscape

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 13, 2003
Messages
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I'm a student, and I use my 12" aluminum powerbook relatively often throughout the day. On the advice of a friend, I'd been going out of my way to keep it tethered to power as often as possible and avoid depleting/recharging the battery, on the assumption that a li-ion battery has only a limited number of cycles, and it would be best to conserve them for times when I'm really out-of-reach of the power grid. However, I've recently read a number of people commenting that leaving a laptop on wall power more or less consistantly actually reduces the lifetime of the battery. Can anyone offer some advice as to how to best promote health and vitality in my battery?

Thanks in advance, and cheers,
Ryan
 
Lion batteries are unique. very high energy density.

There are two main things that kill a lion battery.

Time, and cycles.

As time goes on, the lion naturally loses some capacity. Say 1.5% a month. Heat accelerates this process...

cycles you know about. i assume you know that one full discharge cycle is equal to two half-discharge cycles, or 4 quarter-discharge cycles... so 300 cycles till battery half-life aint too shabby.



Really, your doing fine. dont worry about it. Dont be afraid to use the battery either. They aren't that expensive you can't afford a new one in two years. :)
 
From what I have heard, it is best to keep the battery activity high...that is to say...make sure to monthly deplete the charge and then recharge it. This keeps the battery cells active.

I guess the main idea is to keep the battery juice coming out and going in on a regular basis.

I hope you find the following links helpful.

A trip to the apple support site and you will find 'Tips for maximizing your PowerBook and iBook battery charge'--which will guide you to optimizing your time on battery.

Link: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50666

Calibration of the battery:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86284

Hardforum topic on leaving the battery plugged in:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=937724&highlight=powerbook+battery
 
since this is a Lion battery...it doens't hold a "memory" like NiCa's did so the monthly discharge won't really do much.....yes it will calibrate it so the computer knows the current status of the battery but it will NOT extend the life of it as it is based on the number of charge cycles that it goes through...with that said I still recomend totally discharging at least every 2-3 months but more for the purpose of YOU knowing what the battery life is....more than once I had people say "I am leaving on a trip in 2 days and my ibook/powerbook isn't holding more than a 20 minute charge" if you know how your battery is behaving then you know when to get a new one

 
Agreed. Now for my question. For the batteries off the internet...do you think it would be ok to get those for backup? I've heard stories of bad batteries doing bad things to macs.
 
I too was wondering about buying a backup battery, an also is there any other ways of getting a higher capacity battery? i'm using a 12" ibook g3 and i was told that i can buy a g4 ibook battery of the same size and it would net me a little more time.
If so then that would be cool to get more time on go.
 
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