Battery life for 1yr old iBook

[Charles Martin]

> From: Brett Forrester <bforrester at macconnect.com>
>> Just curious...how long does the average iBook battery last before it 
>> starts
>> losing it's capacity?

I thought I'd chime in to answer both Guy's and Brett's question based 
on the experience of owning two "clamshell" iBooks, one original 
Tangerine and one original Graphite SE (the 366 clear one, not the 
later 466 one).

At the risk of sounding like I'm boasting, I knew when I bought these 
machines that the battery in them is basically a very large cell-phone 
battery, so I used the best consensus advice I had at the time: drain 
them COMPLETELY the first time you use them, charge them back up fully, 
then use as normal. This seems to have paid off handsomely.

To date, both machines continue to get 4 to 4.5 hours of use on their 
original batteries. Both machines were bought about a year after the 
initial introduction of the iBook.

> 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.

My machines run 9.2.2 (Tangerine) and 9.1 (Graphite). I played with 10 
on the graphite but ultimately decided that I'm not happy with OS X at 
800x600. Both machines are used for extremely light duty (email, web 
surf, word processing and simple games like Yahtzee). They're writer's 
machines, essentially. They both have an extra 128MB chip in them (so 
the Tangerine has a total of 160, the Graphite 192) which doesn't seem 
to have affected the battery at all. I don't run Airport cards in 
either one of them.

> 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).

Something's clearly wrong there. Under OS X I'd expect to see short 
battery life, but not like that.

_Chas_
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