BusyBee OSX

PowerBook Battery and Mac OS X 10.2.4

Today I've read an article on MacOSXHints mentioning about the effect of 10.2.4 on powerbook batteries. Some people claimed that it corrupts the LiON battery. The article provided a bash script (below) that checks the battery capacity.

#!/bin/bash

[ -x /usr/sbin/ioreg ] && \

    /usr/sbin/ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n "battery" -w 0 | \

    sed -ne '/| *{/,/| *}/ {

        s/^[ |]*//g

   /^[{}]/!p

    }' | \

    awk '/Battery/ {

    gsub("[{}()\"]","", $3)

      gsub(","," ",$3)

  split($3,ct," ")

  # extract flag value and convert to hex

       sub("Flags=","",ct[2])

        str=sprintf("Flags=%d/0x%03x",ct[2],ct[2])

    sub("Flags=[0-9]*",str,$3)

        # get max and current charge levels

   sub(".*=","",ct[4])

   sub(".*=","",ct[5])

   printf("%s [%.1f%%]\n",tolower($3),100*ct[5]/ct[4])

    }'

# EOF

My output for one of my battery was

voltage=16850 flags=7/0x007 amperage=1200 capacity=4270 current=4188 [98.1%]

The capacity and current is in mAH. It was relatively in par with another person who ran the script and got

voltage=11928 flags=4/0x004 amperage=1023 capacity=4192 current=3692 [88.1%]

And he got his iBook 800 running for 5 hours usually.

I also saw a link to a summary on how to improve your laptop battery life here
Note to self: Check the other battery capacity.

Posted by zoo at March 17, 2003 05:40 PM