Don't panic. I'm assuming that although you can't go to an apple store easily, you can still call Apple and ask for help. Your macbook is still under warranty, most likely, Apple will make it right.
My battery started doing exactly the same thing a few months ago. My macbookpro was out of warranty, but Apple had extended the warranty on the battery in my particular model to cover 24 months due to some earlier battery problems. In fact, this battery had been one they had replaced.
You, my friend, are in better shape, as you are still in the one year warranty.
It sounds like your problem is either the battery, as it was in my case, or your charger is bad.
The easiest way to narrow it down is to try someone else's charger. Or if that is not possible, just buy a second charger and try it. It's not a waste to get a second charger even if the battery ends up being bad, it's good to have an extra. You could keep one in your laptop bag and one plugged into the surge suppressor under your desk so you don't have to keep unplugging it when you want to take the laptop out of the house. (I have always had at least one extra charger for each of my three Mac laptops. Chargers do eventually go bad.)
If it's not the charger, as I verified in my own case, call Apple. Have the serial number of your battery ready. IN fact, while I'm thinking about it, check the Apple website and see if there are issues with your battery model.
Do all those PRAM things suggested above. Then you can tell Apple what you have already done.
In my case, they sent a new battery, I think it took two days to arrive. I packed up the old battery and sent it back using the DHL prepaid label they supplied. You even get to call DHL and tell them to come to your house and get the battery.
They might ask for a credit card and say they'll charge it if you don't send the old battery back. They accidently charged mine, because of the 24 month replacement, it confused their system, but I called them and they gave me a credit very quickly.
Good luck, and I hope this helped.
That's a lot of interesting information, thanks
I have a few questions on it though:
First, do i need a surge protector after all? I asked them when I bought this machine, and they said I didn't really need it with just one notebook, especially since after all, I would be taking it outside the house where presumably the surge protector would sit, so what would I do, take the big surge protector along? So I never got one, was that bad? We did have computers in this house before (two laptops, one old desktop, all PCs), and nothing untoward went down, and since they told me I didn't need it, I didn't get it.
I'll try to go to the apple showroom place and try one of their chargers (yep, no apple stores in this country...just apple showrooms
), because at 150 bucks a pop plus weeks of waiting for the special order to come in when buying locally, or cheaper but still a long wait for buying online, it's not very practical.
I know this is gonna sound really ignorant, but where do I find the serial number and model for the battery, and how do I check if there were problems with it like you said?
If I get the treatment you got, I'll deffo be happy with that, lol. The worse thing is I was a bit hesitant about buying the laptop when I did (even though my previous Acer one had died), because I knew how cr@ppy the situation is in this country when it comes to macs especially, but really all apple products (okay, didn't know quite how bad, but I knew it was subpar compared to Apple). I just thought since I intend to move abroad before the first year is up anyway, I'd lie low during that then go crazy afterwards, but the MB didn't think so as it turns out
To give you a clue how bad things are around here, it seems that at least on the anecdotal level, this has gotta be the only european country where the majority of music players you see walking around are NOT ipods, which just tells you really--everybody's rocking to an ipod, except here! It's pretty lame. but what do you expect? This country has the lowest broadband penetration in all of Europe, compared to oversaturation of the cell phone market, atjust over 4% of all households (and that's not even looking at how often they're actually using it--many use it only a couple of times a week for a few hours). In other words, yak yak yak amongst one another on your cell (or both of them, since more and more seem to have more than one
), but no opening up to the big wide world what. so. ever.
/rant