I would recommend twice a month at the least, once is a little not-often-enough in my opinion. Congrats on the iBook purchase anyway, they're really nice!
to know of a FULL charge as well, the piece you plug into the ibook will light up, yellow is charging, green is charged. you can also flip your ibook around and press the button on the battery pack- 4 green lights for fully charged. you can use this with your ibook on or off- cool feature!
to know of a FULL charge as well, the piece you plug into the ibook will light up, yellow is charging, green is charged. you can also flip your ibook around and press the button on the battery pack- 4 green lights for fully charged. you can use this with your ibook on or off- cool feature!
It's a good article. The batteries are "smart", meaning that they are self-protective (they won't over or under charge). They have a processor that tracks a number of things. To make sure that your getting the best-estimated battery power/time remaining/% of charge, you need to drain the battery until the computer puts it's self to sleep and can't be woken again. This causes the battery to calibrate its self. Do this once a month.
X-ChargeThis little app is great. It gives information in the DOC and also give detailed stats as well as a charge and discharge graph over time. This is always running on my computer. I have it set to load on startup.
To see how many cycles and how what the capacity of your battery is:
Finder ->About This Mac-->Click More Info-->Contents->Hardware->Power>Battery info.
Write down or note the Full and Remaining Capacity number somewhere. Over time the Full Capacity number will drop slowly with time and charge cycles. The Remaining Capacity number will drop as the battery is discharged, but over time its maximum (Full Capacity) will decrease. Note the number of Cycles to see how many times you have completly charged and discharged (even incrementaly) the battery. This is just for kicks, but I like to know how my batteries degrade over time.