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quentinwolf

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 2, 2009
8
0
Alberta, Canada
I have a 30 month old MacBook Pro (the SantaRosa line from June 2007)... And was still using the original battery up until 3 days ago. Its capacity suddenly dropped from 83% down to 45%, so I took it to an Apple store, they did a diagnostic, and without question told me the battery was defective, and just gave me a brand new battery with only 1 loadcycle on it. So today I decided to calibrate it, had it charged up, unpulgged it and let it run until it was 'supposed' to go to sleep... It had 0% left on it, the screen shut off, and the sleep light was just starting to dim, when I heard the hard drive go BZZZZZZZWheeeeeeeeeeooooooooo... (As if one pushed and held the power button, aka hard shutdown).
It seems it didn't have enough reserve capacity to let it go to sleep, so instead of waiting the 5 hours (as it wasn't sleeping, and pressing the button on the battery showed no lights at all), I decided to plug it in right away. Would it be a good idea to calibrate again, or simply wait a month or so and do it again then? :)

When I turned the computer back on, it didn't even resume at my desktop, so not only did it not get to sleep properly, it didn't even have a chance to write the memory to the hard drive, and now the actual battery capacity in Coconut battery is showing up 95%, 5253mAh

Just curious, as 30 months ago when I first got my original one, it calibrated properly and didn't completely die when it got to reserve capacity... ;)

Thanks!
 
Unless you let it drain completely (hence the 5-hour recommendation), then you haven't calibrated yet. You don't have to wait a month to calibrate. You can do it at any time.
 
Unless you let it drain completely (hence the 5-hour recommendation), then you haven't calibrated yet. You don't have to wait a month to calibrate. You can do it at any time.

That's exactly it, it must have drained completely, but the laptop didn't have a chance to put itself to sleep before the battery depleted. Before plugging it back in to charge, I flipped it over to check the battery power meter, and usually at this state, the one dot flashes rapidly showing its critically low, but nothing lit up at all.

I read somewhere that someone said after it goes to sleep during its reserve capacity, that's when its able to calibrate the battery, thus the 5 hour wait... But since it didn't have the chance to properly go to sleep since the battery ran out of power, will it have been able to calibrate properly? :)

Thanks for the extremely quick reply!
 
You still didnt let the battery drain, all the way the hdd turns off to save power (I believe it stores the data on the disk and just turns off, although I am not sure). Just calibrate it again there is no harm in doing it, this time just let it sit for the 5 hours.
 
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