[365]

I have a Rev D 12" Powerbook that is perfect but for one problem and that might not be a problem.

When I put the machine to sleep the battery seems to have excessive drain. For instance I put it to sleep on Sunday afternoon with 79% charge and woke it Monday evening - 30 hours later - and the charge was only 34%. Also, if I run the machine so that the battery becomes discharged to the point that it goes into forced sleep and then leave it asleep for 2-3 hours the battery loses all its charge and the machine just switches off losing any unsaved work.

Is this normal?

[donniedarko]

Originally posted by 365:
I have a Rev D 12" Powerbook that is perfect but for one problem and that might not be a problem.

When I put the machine to sleep the battery seems to have excessive drain. For instance I put it to sleep on Sunday afternoon with 79% charge and woke it Monday evening - 30 hours later - and the charge was only 34%. Also, if I run the machine so that the battery becomes discharged to the point that it goes into forced sleep and then leave it asleep for 2-3 hours the battery loses all its charge and the machine just switches off losing any unsaved work.

Is this normal?

Yeah that sounds about right 30 hours of sleep mode off the battery will drain it over time. Sleepmode is different the hibernate mode of pc laptops. PCs put the ram info on the h/d and shut down the ram while sleep mode shuts down everything but the ram. And yes the battery will die within 2-3 hours once it shuts down because of leak of charge. That 2-3 hours is meant to give you time to plug it in.

[Dr.Michael]

Originally posted by 365:

Is this normal?

Yes, I think so. My Rev b also needs a lot of battery power in sleepmode.
The times of 6days sleep that was possible with the Pismo (and some TiBooks) seem to be over.
Maybe you can extend the time by making sure bluetooth is switched off (just a guess).

[ibook_steve]

Bluetooth and just about everything else is shut off in sleep, so it doesn't matter if you turn these things off or not before going to sleep. The only significant (and it's not really that significant) power drain in sleep is maintaining the DDR memory in self refresh mode so that memory contents are preserved. Therefore, the more memory you have, the more power used in sleep. However, the benefits of extra memory far outweigh the loss of sleep longeviity. And yes, sleep time on battery is much less than it was in the G3 Powerbook days, but I guess more power is required to maintain DDR versus the SDRAM used in those machines.

Steve

[365]

It's good to know I don't have to send it in for repair. I have a 1GB SO-DIMM fitted so I suppose that must draw some power itself. Thanks everyone.