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... What was just a Charger Issue to start with!

C

confused.apple

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 10, 2010
5
0
Hey guys! So i my problem compels me to post my first ever thread here, I have been reading and benefitting from this forum a long time now..

I own a Mac Book Pro Mac OS X Version 10.4.11
Now.. I lost my charger that came with this notebook once, and i started using my brother's Mac Book charger for a while. After a couple of months i bought a new one prescribed for the Mac Book PRO...

Only to realize that the battery had failed me by then, my laptop was no more a 'mobile' device, it would only work when plugged in to a charger! After this i went through two 'more' new chargers as each failed me for some reason :-?

... Now i have a mac book pro, which doesn't work without a charger ( the battery icon shows a battery thats runs out 20 times more quickly than normal and the laptop shuts down when it comes down to something like 87%), Also no matter what charger i use now, it flashes constantly going back and forth from red to green.

Please help me with a solution and unravel this mystery for a technically handicapped person :) Is buying a new battery and a new charger the 'IT' solution?

Thanks in advance !!
 

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Using a charger with the incorrect power properties will destroy your batteries capacity (I had a similar problem with a 2.33 ghz MBP)

Buy a new battery, a proper charger, and that will most likely fix your problems.

Also, 500+ load cycles on those old batteries is a lot!:D
 
@ deeya ...

hmm your probably right! i have been through 3 proper chargers (made for my computer) in this period! i cant beleive im gonna have to buy a battery AND acharger this sucks!

but this is showing load cycles for the charger or the computer (as in the battery inside the computer) ?
 
The load cycles coconut is showing are for the battery inside the computer.

The 11% number is showing the current capacity your battery has as a percentage of what a new battery would have, basically your battery is only holding 11% of the total possible charge.

I mistakenly used my wife's 60w power adapter on my MBP for almost a week after we came back from vacation, and noticed my battery capacity go down steadily over the week. After replacing the adapter with the right one, my dog chewed through the cord, and I bought a cheap Chinese knock off adapter off ebay. I then purchased a knock off battery off ebay to try and fix the lack of capacity problem, but the cheap ebay battery failed as well.

The lesson I learned is to stick with genuine hardware, the cheap chinese knock offs aren't warrantied very well, and when it fails, its money wasted.
 
I had a problem like this on my old Compaq, it wasn't the charger as much as the internal mechanism taking the charge. The battery and everything was fine but what was taking the charge turned out to be loose from the circuit board. The laptop was in bad condition anyways, and I mean real bad condition. It was picking up every known virus, would take an hour or more to start up and everything. I brought it to Best Buy while I still had the warranty on it and they couldn't fix it, then I left it at Staples for maybe a week to be repaired (Don't go there) and they said they never saw anything like it, they ran maybe 10 different anti-virus scanners and in the end had to do a factory restore (which amazingly didn't help 100%). I was out a few hundred dollars in the end and they wanted me to pay a few hundred more to repair the charge issue.
 
totally agree with you guys,.. original is the way to go... and the chargers i was talking about - the ones destroyed by my computer were all original too :(

im gonna try the smc in a while.. lets see where it takes me..
 
^^^^^
You don't mention how old your MBP is. I would just take it to an Apple Store and have them replace the battery.
 
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