Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / March 2006

Hi all, I recently picked up a Tangerine iBook (300mhz G3), and
everything works great about it (surprisingly fast considering its
age), except the battery.

Now the obvious reply is "its a six year old li-ion, it'll be dead",
except it isn't dead, it holds a good three and a half hours charge,
but the problem is, it wont charge when the machine is running. If its
off, or in sleep, it'll charge, but the moment it boots or wakes up,
the ring turns green and it refuses to charge.

I thought at first maybe it was a problem with osX not recognising the
hardware (coming from windows you can see why I'd jump to that
conclusion), but the same thing happens under os9, so thats not it.
I've now got 10.4.5 running on it and system profiler is vaguely
informative on the subject, giving the output below. I'm using its
original flying saucer type ac adaptor, and right now the battery is
full since I left it sleeping for a few hours earlier.

Battery Information:
 Battery Installed:    Yes
 First low level warning:    No
 Full Charge Capacity (mAh):    2790
 Remaining Capacity (mAh):    2790
 Amperage (mA):    0
 Voltage (mV):    16494
 Cycle Count:    77
 AC adapter cannot charge battery:    Yes

AC Charger Information:
 AC Charger (Watts):    26
 Connected:    Yes
 Charging:    No

The first thing which jumps out at me, is that the ac adaptor has
printed on the outside of it that it should be a 45W adaptor, yet it is
apparently only outputting 26W. Is there any way to tell if this is
accurate or not? The other obvious thing is the oh so useful note that
"AC adapter cannot charge battery: Yes" I've tried googling this phrase
and come up with nothing. Infact I've googled until I ran out of
keywords and ideas, all with no joy.

I've tried a full discharge/refill cycle, I've tried resetting the PMU,
when under os9 I tried using apples "battery reset 2.0", none of which
helped.

Has anyone else had a problem like this? I dont want to have to buy a
new battery as they're not cheap, and I dont entirely trust how new
they'd be, and this one does hold a good long charge.

Many thanks in advance.

-- Tyr