Since some weeks ago, my Powerbook's battery (two years old) does not work correctly. It should let me use my laptop between three and five hours but last week I was only able to use it one hour long.
I started to search for a solution (one solution that does not imply a new
battery) and I found several options at the
Apple's Support website.
The first article I found is about how to
calibrate the battery to get the best performance but that's only useful if your battery is new :-(.
The second article talks about a way to
reset the PMU (The Apple's Power Management Unit). I don't get why could this article help me with the battery.
After a week playing with all this options (and others I found with google), my battery state changed but instead of get fixed it only lets me use the laptop for about 15 minutes !!!
I was really disappointed because this week I was at the OSWC and I needed all battery power I could get :-(.
Now after some testings I think I have a way to recover my battery, I don't know
if I will be able to recover it as a new one, but It's better than nothing.
I was playing with the laptop and stopped the PMU daemon, that way the laptop
does not sleeps automatically when the battery thinks is close to be empty. The
funniest thing about that is that I was able to use my laptop two hours more
with the battery "empty":
flags : 00000011 charge : 0 max_charge : 432 current : -939 voltage : 14117 time rem. : 0
After that test I'm sure that my "intelligent" battery manager is completely stupid :-(
The best part is that after the test, I recharged the battery and I won more battery capacity (the max_charge entry is the important field):
flags : 00000011 charge : 1040 max_charge : 1040 current : 0 voltage : 16360 time rem. : 0
I don't know how many times this trick will work, but I will try it as much as possible :-), I think the normal number is a max_charge of 3000 or 4000 so I will try to get as close as possible to that number :-P.
