iBook battery care q's

opik said:

1) Should I never charge the battery till it's completely drained?

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It's good to use it until it is completely drained about once a month, this is called calibrating. Although normally you should use it until it's to about 20% left.

opik said:

2) If I use the laptop at home a lot, is it safe to keep the battery in fully charged while plugged to the wall?

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Yes, I do this all the time and I haven't seen any ill effects from it.

iBookG4user said:

Yes, I do this all the time and I haven't seen any ill effects from it.

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Yeah, Apple's designs are all made so that the battery is allowed to naturally discharge (it's not being used, just the fact that batteries slowly lose charge over time due to leak currents) until it reaches <95%, and the system won't attempt to recharge it until then. Then the system recharges it to 100%. So it's set up to not abuse the battery while you're on outlet power. I did this all the time with both my original battery, and now with the replacement from the recall, which I've used for about 40 cycles, and currently use about weekly for most of a cycle while traveling to a clinic in Jacksonville for the day. About once a month, as iBookG4User said, I actually let it finish draining all the way to zero and then recharge it; otherwise, I just plug it back in when I get home.

I'm a little dissapointed with my ibook G4's battery I got It a year ago and its health is at 79% so It degraded faster than I thought

otis123 said:

I'm a little dissapointed with my ibook G4's battery I got It a year ago and its health is at 79% so It degraded faster than I thought

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How many cycles does it have? The amount you use it is a much bigger determinant than anything else. If you've used it 80-100 times, that's going to be about right.... you might try recalibrating it, though, if you haven't done that recently.

mkrishnan said:

How many cycles does it have? The amount you use it is a much bigger determinant than anything else. If you've used it 80-100 times, that's going to be about right.... you might try recalibrating it, though, if you haven't done that recently.

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I don't know the cycles (I'm on my iPhone) but I calabrated last week