Battery life for 1yr old iBook

[Brett Forrester]

>Just curious...how long does the average iBook battery last before it starts
>losing it's capacity?  My iBook is just over a year old and I barely every
>ran it off the battery until I recently got a wireless router for my house.
>Now I'm lukcy if I get an hour's battery life.  Weird thing is, the little
>meter indicates it should have about an hour left, then all a sudden it goes
>into sleep and the battery doesn't have any juice left.  What's up with
>that?  Do I need to buy a new battery already??  Thanks for the info!
>
>-Guy McMickle

Guy and iBook gang,

I'm a bit behind in reading my iBook digests, but I was just about to 
ask the same question of the list members when I came across this 
posting. In my response, I have one question to you and one 
(reiterating yours) to our colleagues here:

1) Guy, what OS are you running? As observed on this list and 
elsewhere, OS 9 tends to have better energy management features than 
OS X (especially since OS X's UNIX underpinnings were designed for 
servers that would never be unplugged, as far as I understand) though 
Apple seems to be working on this with each new OS X update. Also, 
since your recent purchase of a wireless router, you are no doubt 
running with your Airport card turned on much of the time, and it has 
also been a frequent observation that Airport cards drain energy even 
if they are just on and not connected; I, for example, have realized 
much longer battery life (up till recently) just word processing or 
playing simple games than when cruising the 'Net.

2) That said, I now reiterate Guy's original question to members of 
the list: how long, given daily use such as for a desktop but with 
nightly shutdowns (and some weekends), does an average iBook (dual 
USB for specificity's sake) battery last? I bought my trusty iceBook 
just after Macworld NY 2001, and its once impressive battery life of 
3-5 hours has now withered to just over one hour (sometimes close to 
two) under either OS 9.2.2 or OS X 10.1.4 (128 MB RAM). I've tried 
resetting the Power Management Button (remove battery, press button, 
wait, replace battery), and I've let my machine drain till it went to 
sleep under its memory-saving warning and charged it all night. Still 
the battery seems to be clearly faltering. Has this battery much 
longer to live? If I purchase a new battery now, how long might this 
original battery serve as an emergency backup? (Anecdotal responses 
would be just fine, even from the Apple lurkers on the list.)

Thanks for your time and consideration.

Cordially,
Brett
-- 
bforrester at macconnect.com