I bought a used 15" MBP (Late 2007) at a pawn shop in December, and it took until April to pay it off. During that time, presumably, the 'Book sat on a shelf, unused, and the battery drained.
I got it home, at long last, and noticed the battery wasn't charging at all, and running Coconut revealed the battery had something like 800 cycles to it, and the app had correctly placed my MBP as being around 27 months old. The advice was to replace the battery. I took the battery out and recycled the power setting, just as a precaution, and put the battery back in.
Not being able to afford to buy a new battery, immediately, I kept the laptop plugged in when in use, and for the first couple of weeks, it would predictably shut off almost immediately after being unplugged. The indicator button on the battery would barely show any signs of life.
Suddenly, about 3 weeks after purchase, the battery started charging, and it would hold what it called a 100% charge for about 20 minutes before totally tanking out and requiring a plug-in. I didn't think anything of it, after all this was a DOA battery. But as the weeks went by, the battery performance actually improved, and the battery was able to fully charge, register with Coconut as fully charged, and give about 2 hours of life before being required to plug back in. Granted, this is probably far below the expectations for a new battery, but for something I thought was a paper weight, it's not doing too badly.
I will still replace the battery soon, but I wanted to share this observation. --JB
I got it home, at long last, and noticed the battery wasn't charging at all, and running Coconut revealed the battery had something like 800 cycles to it, and the app had correctly placed my MBP as being around 27 months old. The advice was to replace the battery. I took the battery out and recycled the power setting, just as a precaution, and put the battery back in.
Not being able to afford to buy a new battery, immediately, I kept the laptop plugged in when in use, and for the first couple of weeks, it would predictably shut off almost immediately after being unplugged. The indicator button on the battery would barely show any signs of life.
Suddenly, about 3 weeks after purchase, the battery started charging, and it would hold what it called a 100% charge for about 20 minutes before totally tanking out and requiring a plug-in. I didn't think anything of it, after all this was a DOA battery. But as the weeks went by, the battery performance actually improved, and the battery was able to fully charge, register with Coconut as fully charged, and give about 2 hours of life before being required to plug back in. Granted, this is probably far below the expectations for a new battery, but for something I thought was a paper weight, it's not doing too badly.
I will still replace the battery soon, but I wanted to share this observation. --JB
