iBook G4 battery issues

[NZDave]

Hi guys (and girls), I need a bit of help.

Someone I know has a G4 iBook, and it's having some battery problems. When it's plugged in, the toolbar says Calculating rather than showing how much time is left to charge. Then when unplugged it drains very quickly. The light around the power adapter is green, indicating a full charge, before she unplugs it.

Any ideas of what could be happening or possible fixes????

 

[Bear]

Searching Apple's support site found document #58450 which essentially talks about this issue. Some other battery articles also come up that may be worthwhile to look at.

Also, searching the MacRumors Forums would have found you the the same advice as the above article.

 

[mkrishnan]

Hi guys (and girls), I need a bit of help.

Someone I know has a G4 iBook, and it's having some battery problems. When it's plugged in, the toolbar says Calculating rather than showing how much time is left to charge. Then when unplugged it drains very quickly. The light around the power adapter is green, indicating a full charge, before she unplugs it.

Any ideas of what could be happening or possible fixes????

It sounds as if it needs to be re-calibrated. Has this been done recently? The procedure is to let the computer drain until it shuts down automatically -- this happens a few minutes after the "running on reserve" warning comes up. This is described here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86284

The other possibility is that the battery is actually going bad, or that the charging circuit is, etc..... Try this command at the command prompt with a full battery:

ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo

You should get a result something like (make the terminal wider than 80 chars first):

| | | | "IOBatteryInfo" = ({"Capacity"=3687,"Amperage"=0,"Current"=3680,"Voltage"=12424,"Flags"=838860805})

For the iBook G4/12", the first number -- Capacity -- was about 4000 when it was new at 100% (mine is a year old). The numbers for capacity and current should be close to the same when the charging ring has turned green at the end of charging....