Powerbook Advice - power supply and battery

[kristiaand]

Hi everyone,
just need a little bit of advice regarding a powerbook i've got.

its a 800Mhz G4 12" alu.

all in all there is nothing seriously wrong with it except the battery is knackered and i do not have a power supply for it..

what i want is some advice and real life experience of ebay batterys and power supplies etc, im in the UK so its hard to source parts for it unless there off ebay.

i did have a look on apples website but they want far to much for a battery and it has really bad reviews from people who bought it.


any advice would be good, i want to save money as i am in the middle of renovating my house, so cannot justify £100's also is there anyway to be sure that it is the battery and not a fault of the laptop? i have a charger in work and it runs fine on that but the laptop states there is no battery available.

however if i remove the battery then plug it back in it tries to charge it for 5 seconds then goes green again.

cheers everyone.
kris

 

[iShater]

Sounds like the battery is dead. You can take it to an Apple Store if you have one nearby and they will tell you what exactly is wrong with it for free.

I replaced my 12" PB charger with a 3rd party one for half the price of the apple charger. But not sure what vendors would carry in the UK.

 

[boyblitz]

I would stay away from ebay batteries unless its from a broken powerbook from a uk seller. I once bought i cheap battery for a phone on ebay, it killed my old nokia .

To be honest i have never had problems with my battery on my old 12" g4 powerbook. As long as you treat them right. Did you ever check to see if you battery was one of the model numbers that got recalled a few years ago. Mine was recalled and it was nice to get a free new battery from apple .

 

[alexprice]

800Mhz PowerBook 12"?

There was a model of iBook G4 that came in 800Mhz

The PowerBook 12" started at 867MHz

Is the battery covered by the warranty extension recall?

What's the first five digits of the machines serial number?

Alex.

 

[kristiaand]

hi all the first 5 digits are UV318 the batterys is V33125 dont think it was part of the recall as it was a works one that was given to me and im pretty sure i had to check it as part of health and Safety at work.

in regards to the processor speed sorry that was me i knew it was 867 but when i wrote the post i could not remember the last 2 digits so i went for 800 and hoped u guys would "overlook" it

im considering getting the charger from ebay as there are a few UK sellers of them but i am really stuck for a battery, its not even keeping enough of a charge to keep the PRAM alive. everytime its off the powersupply when i next switch it on i get prompted to set the date and time.