Battery down fast

[MacMyk]

Hello, I just purchased a Powerbook 15" g4 from apple.com, I have had it for about a month and I love it but the batterly life is really pathetic I will be just browsing the net after 5 minutes 5 percent of the battery will go down. I get about an hour to hout and a half does everyone else get the same? I thought it gets like 3.5-4 but maybe i read somewhere wrong.

Thanks, MacMyK

 

[tariq]

Thats way too little, usually 2.5hrs is the minimum with constant heavy usage.

Try...

* Recalibrating your battery (use laptop past low battery warning, until it goes to sleep itself)

* In Terminal, type: ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo
What does it return?

And to conserve and get the most battery life during use...

* Turn off BlueTooth
* Turn off Wifi (if not needed)
* Lower brightness to 4-5 bars
* Mute volume (if not needed)
* Lower hard disk spin down time (using APM Tuner X or Cocktail)

If all of that fails to help, talk to Apple since it might be a bad battery.

 

[MacMyk]

Capacity"=4400,"Amperage"=1521

 

[tariq]

I get 4501 and 1200 so that sounds about right.

 

[hype.it]

I just carry a spare Battery. You have about 30 - 60 secs (depends on the amount of memory you have installed) to change the Battery while it's sleeping. After, you just wake the system and back to work.

 

[red milk]

* In Terminal, type: ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo
What does it return?

i got: "Capacity"=4035,"Amperage"=1233 (i just unplugged it from charging, 56% charged)

with time the amperage was rising, obviously.

it tells me absolutely nothing. care to help?

 

[SamR]

I never get any more than 1.5hrs w/ 4bars of brightness, bluetooth off, wifi off, and only running 2 programs.

 

[tariq]

red milk, from those numbers you can see that your capacity is low when compared to a new battery which has a capacity of 4400-4500. (as the battery ages with use, it can't hold as much charge)

since my post in August of this past year, my capacity has dropped to 4340 from 4501

SamR, how old is your laptop?

 

[General_K]

Mine came back with 4651 and 1127. 3 months old.

 

[SamR]

mine is just 5months

 

[SamR]

Just checked, capacity = 2099 Amperage = 1797

 

[tariq]

That explains your 2hr battery life, battery only has half the original capacity :/

 

[red milk]

so me and SamR are both screwed! nice.
could it be that the battery ages that much faster cuz of extensive airport use?

 

[red milk]

wait... i see he's got a much lower number now... so how does that explain my battery running for just as little time then? >_<

 

[SamR]

Well my computer's going to the Apple store (for the 5th time in 5 months, i should get a prize) They were supposed to fix my short battery life when the motherboard was replaced (for the second time) so this proves it still sucks, luckily it's still under warranty.