hi, i got the old ibook battery problem - percentage goes down to about 85% and then the ibook turns off. tried resetting the pmu and recalibrating the battery, nothing did work. i think i remembered i read somewhere it could be helpful if you fully decharge your battery with a lightbulb or something, cause if its in normal use there will always be some energy left in the battery. does anybody know if this could help me, has anybody tried this yet? any help appreciated
A multi-cell lithium battery can't be fully discharged. At least by design. It would ruin it, and possibly give NEGATIVE charge! I'm not kidding, google for it. They have built in electronics to prevent it. Now, discharging to 5% or something, sure. But I don't see how it would help. If your battery quits at 85%, you probably need a new one or your ibook is hosed... That's what I would think... How old is the battery? My friend's iBook battery was useless-- 10 minutes of run time or so. but he refused to buy a new one. I don't know why.
the battery runs just fine, i don't know 2 or 3 hours. it's just that the status indicator in the menubar can't calculate the remaining time and counts from 100 - 85 like a normal battery would from 100 - 0. so it's not that big of a problem, but it's kinda annoying. i read lots about this problem at the apple.com discussion, but they must have deleted the old threads, anyway this is not a software problem, a new battery would do the trick but i ain't gonna spend 70 bucks just for knowing how much time is left so i thought i'd go the cheap way