Accidental battery life development

[Brian Pearce]

There's been an interesting (accidental) development with my battery 
life that I thought worth mentioning here:

I have a Key Lime iBook with the original battery it was purchased 
with; the battery is about three years old by now, and has seen 
consistent, almost daily use. The battery has been slowly losing it's 
capacity (switching to OS X hasn't helped matters much), to the point 
where it was down to about a half-hour between charges. (I'd been 
consistently draining the battery as much as possible between charges; 
but with the diminished battery life, I've just been charging it 
whenever it isn't in use.) The usual remedy of resetting the power 
manager hadn't made a difference.

Over the holiday weekend, I left the iBook (unplugged, with battery 
fully charged) in sleep mode for about three and a half days; when I 
returned, I used up the remaining battery power, and plugged the iBook 
back in to recharge the battery. What's interesting is now I find I 
have slightly improved battery capacity; about an hour instead of a 
half-hour.

I've discharged the battery completely on numerous occasions (by actual 
use, not just leaving the computer in sleep mode), but it never made 
any difference. I'm tempted to shift all my current files to another 
computer and leave the iBook in sleep mode for a week, to see if it 
makes any further improvement. (An additional thirty minutes may not 
sound like much, but it doubled my battery life!)

BRIAN/bpearce at cloud9.net

(And yes, I know I need a new battery.)