Battery life

[Bob Knudson]

I wanted to share some experience with battery performance over the life of
my computer (so far):

I have a 667 TiBook, with DVD/CDRW and OS X 10.2.3, that is about one year
old. In almost daily use, I've regularly run off the battery until its down
to 10 or 20%, and then recharge. This usage is normally with the airport
card in use. I've been getting almost 2 hours of use out of the original
battery. But the cycle times seem to be decreasing.

I recently purchased an M8244G/B replacement battery and am very impressed.
I now start with between 3.5 and 4 hours of capacity. In fact, it was a real
pain to calibrate the battery one evening earlier this week, because I
didn't want to stay up for four hours to run the battery down to the warning
message. ;-)

I haven't easily found any data online regarding decreases in battery
performance through a year's worth of usage. But, so far, I'm finding that a
replacement battery is a good investment after about a year's usage. Has
anyone else developed a rule of thumb in this regard?

Bob Knudson