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12" rev. B PB battery "crashes"

QCassidy352

QCassidy352

macrumors G5
Original poster
Mar 20, 2003
12,198
6,372
Bay Area
my 12" rev. B powerbook is 9 months old. It used to have good battery life, but it has been declining (to be expected, I guess). Tonight, with only itunes and camino running, the battery lasted only about 1.5 hours, at which point it was at 21%, showing ~40 min more of life. Then, it just crashed. From 21% to zero in one second. It's fine now that it's plugged back in... but why did this happen? It didn't used to happen... advice? thanks!
 
You should try recalibrating your battery. Keep running your laptop until it forces itself to sleep. Just ignore the warning messages and keep on using it. Once the battery is completely empty, the laptop will sleep, then you need to charge the battery up completely. That may help. Here's an Apple article that talks about it:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86284
 
try the recallibrating, but it seems to me your powerbook is fried... Had it happening with my 12 inch rev A also, would go to sleep at 30% left, really annoying but you learn to live with it.
 
Same here.

That started happening to me a while back as well. ( I have 12'' Rev A. though) I think it was about the 9 month mark as well. All of a sudden the computer would just crash. No warning, nothing. A very big problem if you ask me.

I tried re-calibrating the battery, and resetting the PMU, like other have suggested, but it never worked for me.

I checked out the Apple Forums, and the macrumors forums, and there were a surprising number of user who have the same problem. It was rather funny, on the Apple.com forums, the Apple people said it was perfectly normal for you computer to randomly go to sleep with less than 30% battery life. RIGHT.:rolleyes: Several said they had gone to the Apple Store and were given new batteries.

I ended up buying a new battery, and it ended up fixing the problem. I think its a bunch of BS myself. A battery that won't even last a year. Diminished life I understand, but completely shutting off, unacceptable.

Good luck in your battle. I hope apple takes care of you.
 
well, it's hard to run the battery to zero, as it crashes before that... However, when it crashes and goes to sleep, I then completely recharge it, so that's as close as I can get to a normal recalibration.

Unfortunately, I do not have applecare. This *should* still be covered under the 1 year hardware warranty, but in my experience, apple is not terribly helpful to people who don't have applecare. I think I may take it to an apple store and see what they say.

This really is unacceptable, though. Diminished life I can understand - I still think it's dropped off rather quickly for a 9 month old laptop, but that's life. But a battery that just goes dead at 20+%? That's not normal deterioration, and it's not acceptable.
 
yay!!! My local apple store replaced the battery. They didn't even verify my story about it crashing, just gave me a new battery. My baby is whole again! ;)
 
DTG said:
It seems the notebook batteries found in the Powerbooks are very sensitive to how they are used.

To help keep your new battery in tip-top shape, take a read of this:

www.apple.com/batteries/
Click to expand...

hey, thanks! I'd never come across that page before, surprisingly. It dispelled quite a few myths that I have read on these boards; a useful source of information for a topic that everyone cares about but few people really understand.
 
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