Service Battery warning... HELP!!!

[Kristenn]

Seriously. I'm stumped. My MacBook Pro (Late 08) is like... almost 9 months old and my battery has 153 charge cycles. Well yesterday it was fine. My battery had 97 percent health. But today I got home from my friends house and I was going to get on my Macintosh to do some video editing stuff (duh, right?) and I clicked the battery icon to change to higher performance and I noticed a message like this in the battery pulldown menu on the menu bar

( /!\ Service Battery) so I checked iStat and the system profiler thing and it said my battery health is 71%!! =O

What the eggnog?! How could it plunge so fast over night? I clicked the message and got Mac Help and it said to see a Apple tech person ASAP. But... at 53 charge cycles should my battery really be that bad? 73% charge sounds awful high to give me a red flag... or yellow, whatever. Do you think something is wrong with the battery?

Thanks

EDIT. Today as in the 7th. I waited til I got up today (8th) to post anything about it. My bad ...

 

[ssdar]

Try calibrate your battery. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490

 

[Kristenn]

I tried cycling the battery. I do it at least once a month anyway. Now it shows 30% battery health. I really don't understand.

 

[sharkync]

It's possible your battery has simply failed. As it is under one year of service, I believe you will get a free replacement.

Good luck

 

[mousouchop]

I tried cycling the battery. I do it at least once a month anyway. Now it shows 30% battery health. I really don't understand.

At this point I would stop worrying about it and go to the Apple Store. If it is a 9 month old unit, you are still under warranty. They will surely replace it. Don't sweat the small stuff!

 

[dan5.5]

make an appointment with a genius, i am sure they will replace in on the spot...

 

[Kristenn]

Well the day after it dropped to 30% after a calibration I charged it and drained it again and it went back up to 94%. I use my battery every day for school so I don't know why it did it but its back where it was before basically. Thanks everyone! It scared me for a minute. How many charge cycles do these have before they start really loosing charge? is it 200 or 300?