[antosha]

I've had my Al PB 15" 1.25Ghz for about a year now. I've been getting 2 hours out of my battery for at least 6 months. I've been discharging it at least once a week. Last week, the CPU was at 100% utilization for about 5 hours a day for a few days, with the SuperDrive working all the while.

Almost immediately after those couple of busy days, the fully charged PB would go to sleep after an hour or less of usage, without the 5min battery charge warning. It looks like my battery life has been reduced to about 1 hour!

Is it possible that overheating the machine over a couple of days, with the CPU and SuperDrive busy, damaged my battery? Is there anything I can do to put more life into the battery?

[cpac]

not sure if the overheating is the issue or not - but this is a widely experienced problem.

it doesn't always work, but if you reset the PMU, you may get your battery life back. (see apple's site for details on how to do this)

[antosha]

Originally posted by cpac:
not sure if the overheating is the issue or not - but this is a widely experienced problem.

IBM offered a free battery exchange for my '98 ThinkPad because the battery area was chronically hot and damaged the battery regardless of what the user does.

If the same problem affects batteries in our laptops, should we remove them when we know the case will be hot for extended periods?

[benwhanlee]

if you're still under warranty, you can ask apple for a replacement. my battery could only hold about half the charge it did when i first got it, so they sent me a new one.

you can also use a program like capacity meter (you can download it free from versiontracker.com) to see what your battery's capacity is. that will confirm for you whether or not your battery is even able to hold the same amount of charge that it did when you first got it. you can also see this information with a terminal command, but i've never seen the terminal command or capacity meter differ in their results.

once thing you may want to reconsider is your weekly discharge. while it is necessary to keep your battery calibrated, deep/heavy discharges seem to have a bigger impact on battery life than lighter ones. my understanding is that it's simply best to keep your machine plugged in as much as possible. for the actual facts you can got to batteryuniversity.com and learn some pretty cool stuff about how batteries work and what is the best way to keep them working.

[Gir]

If this is the right battery, you may be able to get it replaced for free. Apple was recalling certain batteries sold with 15" pbs.

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