[P1] Battery life issues

[Brian Pearce]

> Unfortunately, I was one of the early adopters and grabbed the update 
> and installed it before they pulled it. Likewise, on the 10.3 upgrade, 
> I just did an upgrade since I didn't have enough room on the hard 
> drive to do a new install or an archive and install.
>
> So, is the conventional wisdom that I should do a clean install of 
> 10.3 to see if that does it? Anyone know for sure? That seems like an 
> awful lot of work to find out it doesn't work. Thanks.

Before you to go to those lengths (and I'm not entirely convinced this 
is necessary), I'd try the recommended steps that come up whenever this 
subject is discussed; run the battery down 'till it goes to sleep and 
then charge it, zap the PRAM, and so on. Some have even suggested 
jumping two connectors on the battery to reset the built-in circuitry. 
There's also a file in Library-->Preferences-->SystemConfiguration 
called "com.apple.PowerManagement.plist," that you can try deleting, 
and then reboot. One report even suggested turning off the indicator in 
the menu bar.

I've had a problem with a sudden loss of battery life only once, and it 
was my own fault. (It was a relatively new battery, and I mistakenly 
did a partial charge instead of letting it discharge fully for the 
first few cycles.) The battery wouldn't take a full charge; it'd be 
less than 10% charged, but still stop charging.

None of the usual steps made any difference for me; the only thing that 
helped was charging the battery in a VST's iBook charger (which I had 
bought mostly to replace my adapter). That did the trick, and I'm back 
up to a little more than four hours again. (For what it's worth, they 
have a refurbished model on sale for $7.99 these days.)

It seems like every time there's an update, some people report battery 
troubles, and some don't. (They've never affected my iBook.) Problems 
are reported even when there aren't changes to power management. Not to 
say that the updates are never the source of the trouble, but I think a 
full-scale reinstallation is a bit like targeting a fly with a bowling 
ball.

BRIAN/bpearce at cloud9.net