Q: MacBook Pro Battery 'Service Battery' after Snow Upgrade

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This could be one of those (rare) occasions where resetting the SMC (System Management Controller) might help - remove the power supply and battery then hold down the power button for 5 seconds before replacing the battery and re-connecting the power then see what it says ?

It is worth a note that I tried that via the KB article sited in the post and it did not work.

I have uploaded the data to the Apple techs via phone last night but the guy could only recommend I reload the whole OS. I did this, it had no impact on the situation.

I think we all still need a solution to this what I think is a software issue.

Can you post the link to the KB article?

I will find a link to it. The KB just has you reset the SMC by powering off the machine removing all power and holding the power button for 5 sec.

As an update I have loaded an external hard drive with 10.5 Leopard and booted the hardware from the known clean OS. No issues reported on the battery it shows 'fair' in the system profiler under Leopard while it shows 'Service Battery' under Snow Leopard.

Support had me reload the Snow Leopard OS last night, the issue remains.

Under Snow Leopard I am able to watch the battery go from 100% to 50% in less than 5 min. No issues under Leopard.

Message was edited by: Bluesummer

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1411?viewlocale=en_US

SMC Reboot KB

Didn't help me...

I have tried calibrating the battery, resetting PRAM (holding command + alt + P + R at boot time), and now resetting SMC.

This is an almost 2-year-old MacBook Pro 3,1 - iStat pro widget says battery health is 70% after 207 cycles. Depending on what I do it still lasts 2-3 hours (which is OK for its age, I think.)

Cheers,
Randy

I upgraded to snow leopard, and just on next day its saying "service battery"!!

My MacBook Pro recently started shutting down when the battery got to about 62%. Now with SL installed I am told to "Service Battery".

My concern is that I no longer receive the low battery warnings, the machine just shuts itself down without warning.

Any thoughts?

I have a ticket in with Apple engineering but they say up to 5 days. Only known fix I have currently is to downgrade your OS.

I did this with out killing off my Snow Leopard Install in the following way.

I have an external 320 GB USB drive.
In Snow Leopard I partitioned the disk so it could be a boot disk.
Booted with the Leopard (10.5) DVD and installed Leopard on the external disk.

If I boot off this external disk by holding option on boot and selecting it, no problems with the battery.

So I am running off this external drive as needed till a fix is available.
NOTE it will mount your main drive so you have access to your files.

hope this helps

Noticed the same thing on my MacBook Pro 2,2. Upgraded to Snow Leopard last Friday, but only noticed that battery issue last night when I took the laptop off power and the battery went dead very quickly and noticed the new Service Battery entry

MacbookPro1,2 checking in with same symptoms. SMC reset did not help. Cycle count at 264 and from iStat Pro health has now dropped from 90% to 56% in a matter of days.

Just noticed the health issue on my machine as well, this morning, on battery power, it showed 76% health in iStat, just now it was fully charged and on A/C power and it showed 36% health. Just took it off and on batter power and now it says 73% health

my battery just gave me the service message for about 5 minutes and said 15 min power remaining, then I searched for this thread and now it says it has 50 mins remaining, started using it at around 70 percent and now it's 54 percent. something weird going on here.

Since installing Snow Leopard, my MacBook Pro is experiencing the same problems generally described above... Fluctuating remaining battery time and fluctuating battery health as well as the Service Battery message. All was fine under Leopard, getting 4-5 hours on a 76% and ~200 cycles battery for my regular workload including word processing, browsing and listening to iTunes, after 2,5 hours of minimal browsing and standby the system goes into sleep mode.