[P1] Battery life for 1yr old iBook

[Tubadude]

Brett,
I will be reading this thread with great interest. Our school bought 60
iBooks (700mhz) in May this year. Almost half of them have developed some of
the battery problems that I see posted here. By the way, they all have
Airport cards that are enabled all of the time, and all run OSX exclusively.
We do have AppleCare, but a "genius" told me that AppleCare won't even
consider replacing a battery unless we are getting less than an hour on a
full charge. So much for Apple's claim that it would get "up to 6 hours".
Cheers,
John


On 11/23/2002 4:25 PM, "Brett Forrester" <bforrester at macconnect.com> wrote:

>> 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