Pismo Battery Issues

By Oli
At 8:53 AM · Friday, 14 March · 2003
To Apple · Unix

I’ve seen my battery life in my Apple Powerbook Pismo drop quite a bit in the three years I’ve had it. I always hoped it was the increasing system and hardware specs yet feared it was the battery’s slow decline. I was interested to finally get some hard info on this via a MacOSX Hints article; Give your battery a thorough checkup. For a fellow *nix newbie, you might have a few issues, so here’s how I solved ‘em.

Keep these things in mind:

  • save the script as a plain text file and with unix linebreaks
    • BBEdit defaults to Mac linebreaks
    • You can do this in pico or vi from the terminal
      • pico desired_script_name.sh (.sh is the extension for shell scripts, and isn't necessary, just good)
      • copy & paste the script (orange text on the hints website)
      • write out/save
    • you need to chmod the script to an executable
      • chmod +x script_name or
      • chmod 755 script_name
  • Make sure you put the battery in the right bay (swap it for the DVD), either while turned off or while using the AC adaptor (remember to unplug the adaptor once the battery is in before testing)

For the record, my battery stats are: voltage=11732 flags=4/0x004 amperage=1179 capacity=1523 current=1419 voltage=0 flags=32 amperage=1200 capacity=10000 current=0 [93.2%] (just unplugged) which seems to be passibly ok

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