[P1] Battery life for 1yr old iBook

[Small Moose Ltd]

On 24/11/02 6:41 pm, "Charles Martin" <chasm at mac.com> wrote:

> 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.

I concur with this statement (and by the way, thanks for your informative
responses to my Quarts Extreme questions Charles). I too own a Graphite
Clamshell, though it is the 466SE model. I very much use it as a writing
machine among other things.

I tend to run it mostly from the AC, but when I do use it on battery power,
I try and run it until its completely empty (when it alerts you to plug it
into a mains source, otherwise it will put itself to sleep to preserve the
contents of memory).

I've had mine for over a year now from new, and I can manage to squeeze
almost four and a half-five hours of use from the battery if I turn the
screen brightness down to half or slightly below, turn off sound, remove any
CD's from the drive and run the screen at either thousands of colours, or
256 grays, which doesn't bother me very much.

If I were to run it at full brightness, I might get three hours maximum, but
I find that it does pay to look after your battery as best you can. I know
there's reports that the battery doesn't have a residual memory, but after
repeated tries, I still think it does a little, or maybe I'm just cracking
up. 

Matt