Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / February 2005

OK, I was having trouble with my (Titanium) PowerBook battery.  I got a
new battery, and the symptoms changed, but did not go away.

What it does now is to run great from a fully charged battery, getting
close to 5 hours of run time in my typical use mode (and that is with
an Airport card running).  But, getting it to fully charge is a
challenge.

On someone's recomendation, I tried out XBattery.  This led to some
very interesting information.

The battery had been sitting at 0%, in spite of the power supply being
plugged in, for several hours before I downloaded XBattery and started
it (XBattery) up.  The status screen in XBattery showed that the
charger was present, but the battery was not charging.  I unplugged the
power supply from the connector at the back of the Power Book and
plugged it back in.  I did this several times.  Each time, the presence
or absence of the charger was reflected correctly in the info window,
but the charging indicator always said not charging.  Suddenly, on one
of the connections, the indicator changed to charging.

Withing a few minutes, the battery level had shot up to 5%.  It
continued to climb steadily for several hours (I went to bed, but let
it run with XBattery recording data).  The battery took about five
hours to fully charge.  When it had fully charged, I unplugged the
power supply, leaving the machine running.  I used it for nearly five
hours, and it then went into coma sleep.  Looking at the graph, the
discharge cycle was very linear on the battery level measurment.  But,
the voltage dropped quikly, then sort of leveled off.

None of this seemed very strange to me (after the initial jiggling to
get it to start charging).

I then plugged the power supply back in.  The same thing happened as
before.  But, after a few attempts, the battery started charging.

Now, this time I left it alone and came back later.  I left the machine
on (it went into a screen saver mode after a while). When I did return,
the battery level graph showed that the battery had charged to about
25% in about half an hour, then stopped dead (at 25%) for two hours!
That is, there was a plateau in the graph.  The battery info window
showed that the charger was attached, but the battery was not charging.
I plugged and unplugged it a few times, nd the battery started
charging again.

So, for some reason, the charger stops charging every once in a while,
and gets stuck in a not charging mode.

Like I say, this is a new battery.  I have tried different chargers (I
have another laptop available, and a third charger--long story).  I did
not try the other chargers with XBattery making measurements, but the
symptoms I noticed before getting XBattery (mainly that it takes
forever to get a charge built up) are the same regardless of the
charger I use.

So, I'm trying to figure out what to do next, and wondering if anyone
has ideas about this particular battery weirdness.  I am tempted to
think it is a mechanical problem, except that the machine knows when a
charger is plugged in.  It just sometimes does not feel like charging.

BTW, I am running 10.3.5.  I believe I mentioned that it is a Titanium
Power Book.