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TiBook Batteries

The battery arrived a little while ago, and here's my initial impression:

First of all, it's definitely not as sturdy as an OEM battery. The bottom cover shows "waves" indicating the structure underneath, where OEM battery looks to be either a solid piece of metal or plastic and has no perceptible give or distortion. The charge level button is also molded into the bottom cover, rather than being a separate piece as on an OEM battery. The color is close if not identical to the OEM battery.

Mine arrived with about 25% charge. The LEDs on the bottom indicated this, and the system confirmed once I'd started it up.

The biggest downside I see so far is that it's a very tight fit in the battery compartment. It took a fair bit of pressure to get it fully seated and retained, and then get the system to recognize it.

I now have it charging. My plan is to charge it fully, and then use the system this evening for normal "light" tasks(web browsing, etc) to see how long the battery lasts.

One small area of concern is that System Report shows it as having a "full charge" capacity of 3985 mAH, and not the 5200 advertised. I'm going to give the system a couple of cycles to get acclimated to the battery before I I take this number too seriously, though.

I'll update once I've run it through a full charge-discharge cycle.
 
Hopefully the battery will achieve it's reported full charge capacity over a few cycles, but otherwise, it's amazing that one can even still get TiBook batteries in 2014!
 
I'll also add that I ordered 1gb of ram, which also arrived today. This perked the system up pretty nicely.

I need to go through my(meagher) stash of laptop IDE drives and see if I can find a faster drive-especially now that(it seems) I actually have a good battery and don't have to worry as much about a fast drive draining the battery.

I also have an older 60gb SSD lying around. I've read some old threads here about folks installing PATA-SATA adapters in their Powerbooks, and may go this route and put the SSD in it. That should both perk the computer up and help the battery life. Plus, it would be a capacity upgrade over what's in the computer now.
 
I haven't timed myself, but so far so good.

First, I downloaded and installed Canon EOS utilities to allow me to tether my DSLR to the computer. This is a surprisingly resource-intensive program that always manages to get my MBP pro heated up nice and toasty(plus drain the battery quickly), and the TiBook managed to handle it well. I took 14 photos, then did basic processing(cropping and rotation) in preview.

I then managed to get two Ebay listings completed.

The total time to do all of this was about the same as what I would have needed on my MBP.

I've been using the TiBook non-stop for the past two hours, and on and off for a fair bit of time before that. Included in that time, as I mentioned, was some work that I know will just about tick off the battery percentage counter on my MBP by the minute. As I type this, I have 32% of the charge remaining, and an estimated time of 58 minutes remaining.

Not too bad, although as I mentioned I'm not happy that the battery didn't actually register at its fully rated capacity.
 
Well, it looks like the 5200mAh isn't going to happen, but the seller did offer me a $5 refund to make up for the difference between the advertised and actual capacity.

So, all said and done I think that I can recommend this. No, it's not as pretty as an OEM battery and the capacity is not as good as even an OEM battery(at least on my sample) but for $25 it's a good way to take an old TiBook from being tethered to the wall to to actually being portable again.

Incidentally, per the serial number my TiBook was built in March of 2003. I wonder how many Windows laptops that old are still that capable.

I've been having a good time the past few days watching snippets of old keynotes(and even complete ones) where some of the products we discuss here with regularity were introduced. In many of them, Steve Jobs would bring out a top-spec Windows box along side a medium or low spec Mac, and show the Mac blowing the PII/PIII/PIV away in intense tasks like Photoshop. These are a fun blast from the past :) . It would be really great if I could enjoy watching them on the machines they were introducing, but Youtube is demanding enough that I pretty much stick to my newer computers for it.
 
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