Restoring life to a failing PowerBook battery...
If you are a PowerBook owner and you start to notice that you are getting less and less from your battery (that is, you get an hour of battery life rather than a few hours), you might be able to extend the life of your battery by following the directions below. This is a crib off of this hint at MacOSXHints.com.
Here, we're basically zeroing out a few of the parameters that your PowerBook keeps in NVRAM. One of these is a counter that is incremented every time your battery cycles... it is either a way for Apple to get you to purchase a new battery before you really need one (hardware lock-in) or it is Apple trying to keep you from milking every last Volt out of these $135 bastards in the interest of computing safety.
To restore good life to your PowerBook battery:
- Write the following directions down on a piece of paper.
- Shutdown your computer.
- Hit the power button to turn it on... and immediately press Command-Option-O-F. (This will boot you into something called Open Firmware... you should see a command-line prompt on a grey background).
- Then type the following (hitting Return after each line):
reset-nvram set-defaults reset-all - At this point, your computer should reboot. You'll notice that your battery has more charge then when you shut down... and it should keep this charge for longer than before (when Apple was hobbling your charging abilities via firmware).
Posted by joebeone at Abril 8, 2004 09:35 AM | TrackBack