battery ???

My Macbook has an icon that shows the percentage of a battery. I just noticed that this dropped from 90+ to 74!!!

I assume this means I need to replace it, but I don't have a clue how. And I'm guessing there's a lithium battery as well as the battery that lets me use the mac when it's not plugged in.

How do I know which battery, and where do I look for it?

Thanks in advance

Jann

jannAZ said:

My Macbook has an icon that shows the percentage of a battery. I just noticed that this dropped from 90+ to 74!!!

Click to expand...

That battery percentage that you see is only for the laptop battery (the battery the laptop runs off of when used while not plugged in). The percentage does not refer to any other battery.

As far as the battery % drop going from 90+ to 74...kind of hard to explain this (or theorize what's going on)...without more info. You didn't really tell us:

- What you were doing at the time.
- If this happened immediately after starting the computer up...or after waking it up from sleeping.
- What model computer you have (you mentioned MacBook, but not what model).
- How old the battery is...and/or if it's the original battery or a replacement.
- How many charge/discharge cycles the battery has.

- Nick

Other World Computing stocks batteries for your MacBook. Not inexpensive but they exceed Apple's specs. LINK

I had something similar happen with my Macbook air last week. I went from 85% to 65% in about 20 minutes. Then I realized what the problem was. I was backing up my machine to my Rikiki drive and the machine was not plugged in. I also read some forums where I realized that if I adjusted my screen brightness I could positively affect the battery life.

I just bought this machine a few weeks ago so I was surprised by the short battery life. However, now all is well and I am definitely getting the advertised battery life of about 4.5 -5 hours.

I do not know if your problems were similar, but I hope this helps.

the first thing i´d do would be to reset the battery.
first of all: let it run completely dry. then check out the post here with the short cut, smc reset
Fixing OS X Lion
if that doesn't help you can still buy a new battery but that´s what apple care suggested first

Thank you all for your prompt responses and good advice.

Nick--I didn't know what other info would be useful. I hoped someone like you would post what I needed to provide.

The Mac is a laptop OS X 10.5.7 (Leopard). The battery is original. That makes it about 3 years old.

The drop probably wasn't as sudden as my panicky post suggested. I was looking at the time when I noticed the last battery number go from 5 to 4, and when I looked at it, I realized the last time I noticed, it was in the 90's. That could have been a couple of months ago. It had been on 3 maybe 4 hours.

It was plugged in, not running on battery. I almost never run it on the battery. I was looking at Google Books. It does not run any other devices.

I don't know what a charge/discharge cycle is or how to find out how many.

Please advise if there's anything else I should add.

Thanks again,
Jann

Another thing I noticed. When I click on the battery icon, both the BATTERY IS NOT CHARGING and POWER SOURCE: POWER ADAPTER are grayed out. Is that how it should be, or maybe part of the problem?

-Jann