Obsessive saving of documents isn't cutting it.

January 18, 2007 3:47 PM

My year-old Powerbook G4 has acquired the habit of suddenly shutting off when it thinks it has no more power, which usually happens when the menubar item says the battery is around 30% full. Do I need a new battery? Or can I massage it into the proper sleeping/hibernating behavior somehow?
posted by dreamyshade to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Mine did that exact same thing and it was extremely annoying. I lost some seim-valuable stuff that way.

I just figured it was time for a new battery. Replacing the battery did do the trick.
posted by vacapinta at 3:56 PM on January 18, 2007

Try recalibrating the battery.
posted by bigbigdog at 3:57 PM on January 18, 2007

Battery recalibration is supposed to fix this problem -- the battery's idea of its capacity being different from its actual capacity -- but it never, ever helped the two batteries I owned that did this. A new battery took care of it for me.
posted by majick at 4:19 PM on January 18, 2007

When this happened to me recalibration didn't work; replacing the battery did. It took longer than a year for me to need a new battery, though. So try the recalibration first and see if it helps.
posted by litlnemo at 4:19 PM on January 18, 2007

You might want to try resetting the Power Management Unit (PMU).

Your manual will tell you how, for your particular model of Mac.
posted by sindark at 4:31 PM on January 18, 2007

Apple Authorized service provider here.

Yup, when the battery reaches the point when it's not giving you its polite "you are running on reserve batter power" message before it runs out of juice, you've reached the point of no return. Time to replace the battery.
posted by hollisimo at 4:54 PM on January 18, 2007

Does the laptop sleep without warning, or shutdown completely?

I have a ~4 year old Powerbook G4 that will sometimes go to sleep without the low-power warning being displayed. This will usually happen if I awake the laptop when it already has a low battery. This causes the laptop to assume it has more battery left than it actually does, and it will sleep without warning.

But the battery works just fine besides this, and will last over a couple hours when charged completely (I've never gotten more than 3 hours of continuous use regardless of age). And if it simply sleeps without warning, I just need to plug it in again, and nothing is lost.
posted by jsonic at 8:15 AM on January 19, 2007

I had the same problem on my iBook, replaced the battery (the Sony recall), problem disappeared
posted by matteo at 9:40 AM on January 19, 2007