If you’re like me you probably charge your PowerBook’s battery in the PowerBook itself and don’t worry too much about it. While this is fine in most cases, it’s going to deplete the charge capacity of your battery over time. Especially if you constantly unplug and re-plug your machine.
While it’s true that Lithium-Ion batteries aren’t susceptible to the “memory effect” of previous battery technologies (like NiMH, for example) a PowerBook battery only has has a limited amount of charge cycles in its useful life. If you’re constantly partial charging your ‘Book, each of these counts toward your total cap of charges before the performance of your battery begins to drop off.
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.
If you’re like me you probably charge your PowerBook’s battery in the PowerBook itself and don’t worry too much about it. While this is fine in most cases, it’s going to deplete the charge capacity of your battery over time. Especially if you constantly unplug and re-plug your machine.
While it’s true that Lithium-Ion batteries aren’t susceptible to the “memory effect” of previous battery technologies (like NiMH, for example) a PowerBook battery only has has a limited amount of charge cycles in its useful life. If you’re constantly partial charging your ‘Book, each of these counts toward your total cap of charges before the performance of your battery begins to drop off.
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.
One reply on “The Apple Core: Battery chargers vs. in-PowerBook charging”
One tip I read online and have tried with a few customer laptops is to boot the machine in target disk mode (hold down the “T” at startup), unplug it and let the machine run out the batter this way. There seems to be some sort of deeper sleep that this causes and anecdotal evidence is for slightly improved performance thereafter. My best guess is that this bypasses software-assistance to the battery and so lets the battery’s control chips cut “closer to the bone” of its absolute lowest charge.