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

The new Aluminium Keyboard firmware update is intended to improve performance of batteries in the wireless keyboard itself, Johnny, rather than in the computer to which it is connected. It only updates Firmware in the keyboard itself, not in the computer.

Cheers

Rod

Rod, how could you be so blind? Impossible, you only want to be right at every cost!
LastMac answer was very honest 'cause they don't know me and they aren't Apple so that is not them fault, but they told me about the problem and because of that they didn't sell a battery!
If you still aren't convinced, but I know you are and only don't want to admit it, think about you produce batteries: you need to know if there are bugs or whatever if you don't want to stay months on the phone speaking to angry people that blame your products and that have to be refunded!

Try running some CPU intensive apps on the same batteries under leopard, sferrari.

As I rarely run CPU-intensive apps, doing so now would be comparing apples and oranges. I would consistently see the problems under SL with only mail running and a browser pointing to something pretty static, like my Yahoo home page. I now do the same and see normal battery life.

Rod, now is the time when any reasonable person in your shoes would admit that he's wrong and walk away. I won't hold my breath.

Hello All, first time poster, but I have followed this thread for a long time as this is not my first time around with this issue. About 6 months ago, i had the 'Service Batter' after Snow Kitty upgrade. I called up customer service and since I had the 3 year Apple Care and my battery cycles were very low 65 i believe it was, they sent me a new one. Very nice of them. About a month later I had to send in my laptop to get the logic board replaced as it was part of the bad lot of gpu boards. Not a big deal, I had the laptop back in 4 days, I'm not going to complain. Tonight, I had the service battery come on. I have alot more cycles on this battery 129 to be exact. So I came back to this thread only to see that there isn't a "true" fix for it. Oh well. So I started with the PRAM reset and SMC reset. Both a no go. Kinda not happy, but I decided to whip out the original Tiger Install Discs and run the Hardware Test. Ran the quick test and found nothing. Ran the Long test and at about20 minutes in, the tester said 6:48 but it was lagging behind, I noticed that the orange charge led lit up on the charge tip which had been green the whole time. So, I stopped the test and rebooted to both Windows boot camp side, and Mac Side and low and behold the 'Service Battery' was gone. Something reset it when the test was running. So I thought I would pass that along to anyone here. It may not work for you, but it did for me and saved me a call to Apple Support or visiting my local Apple Store for further assistance. So try the Apple Hardware Short and then Long test and see if it resets it for you too. Again though, It may have been a fluke or something and I have no real reason as to why it is working now, but it is. Best Regards, Sam

Well, I spoke too soon. Not 20 minutes later the 'service battery' is back, so barely even a temporary fix. But at least I got some charge time out of it.

My daughter says that TinkyWinky (the teletubbie) doesn't have a triangle in its head but it is in fact a half-square. They need somebody to argue this on the forum www.teletubbie.com/fourms/buynew_batterieseverytime/.

Apparently they have reached agreement on triangle but would appreciate somebody arguing that its really a circle, isn't it obvious?

Rod, this forum is to discuss MacBook Pro 'Service Battery' and Snow Leopard issues. If you have no issues this is clearly the wrong forum for you, your confusing the issue. Can I suggest a new forum - 'I have no MacBook Pro battery issues with Snow Leopard'?

DaveEvans wrote:
Rod, this forum is to discuss MacBook Pro 'Service Battery' and Snow Leopard issues. If you have no issues this is clearly the wrong forum for you, your confusing the issue. Can I suggest a new forum - 'I have no MacBook Pro battery issues with Snow Leopard'?

Unfortunately, that would negatively impact his desire to reach the 10,000 post milestone.

Don

Johnny Storm wrote:
Don,

I was hoping you'd post that link, so thank you for that. Now this company just needs an exchange program, where I send them my old battery and they send me a new one at a discounted price. =)

-John

Hi John,

It would be great if Apple provided that (through a resource I guess). In any case, no sense in spending $129 (plus tax) for a new MacBook Pro battery that SL is going to choke to death when you can get one for less than 50% of the price.

I'm sure Apple's focus in on today's big announcement. After that's over, I'm sure the spotlight will be turned to this issue again. I'm confident Apple will "fix" the issue, one way or another.

Don

DaveEvans wrote:
Rod, this forum is to discuss MacBook Pro 'Service Battery' and Snow Leopard issues. If you have no issues this is clearly the wrong forum for you, your confusing the issue. Can I suggest a new forum - 'I have no MacBook Pro battery issues with Snow Leopard'?

Dave this thread is to help people resolve battery issues after updating to Snow Leopard. helping people resolve their problems is what these boards are all about. If you look back through the posts you will see that in quite a number of cases, doing things like resetting the SMC, getting the battery tested and replaced if necessary (sometimes for free under warranty) , etc have actually assisted people in doing so.

A small number of vocal people have not been so lucky, or have not been prepared to follow such processes for reasons of their own. Some essentially simply continue to repeat the mantra "its a Snow Leopard bug" regardless of the circumstances of the particular case in question. I've yet to see this approach result in a single solution for anyone at all.

Cheers

Rod

I recently installed Snow on my computer on my 32bit macbook pro and I am now having that service batter issue. I also now only get about an hour of use out of my battery since I did the upgrade. I followed the instructions to do the restart removing the battery and power cord then holding down the power button down for a few seconds with still no luck. how do I fix this and get my batter back to normal. I hate to have to spend $100+ on a new battery when I don't need one.

PLEASE HELP

Hi adrisen,

Good to see you have already tried an SMC reset.

Now

1) Head to the Apple menu / About this Mac / More info... and select the "Power" section under "Hardware".

2) Copy the information in the "Battery Information" section and post it here so it is possible to get some idea of the "health" of the battery, the number of cycles it has completed, etc etc.

Given that you bought this computer back in 2006 (unless you have subsequently replaced the battery with a new one) I'm afraid it is probably nearing the end of its life span regardless. The "service battery" warning gives you some indication of this.

With most applications there will be little difference in power usage under Snow Leopard or Leopard (if that is what you were using before). One known issue, however, involves accessing "Flash" based websites in Safari when Safari is running in 64 bit mode. To change this highlight Safari in the finder, choose "Get Info", and change Safari to run in 32 bit mode. Hopefully Adobe will bring along a more "battery friendly" 64 bit version of Flash before too long.

You should also make sure that you have updated other software that you use to Snow Leopard compatible versions, and check that you don't have any processes "hogging" CPU time (following the instructions at http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1473 ). It is not uncommon to find that third party apps (and sometimes even Apple ones) will become "processor hogs" after an OS update. Similar problems have occurred with a variety of Canon and HP printer drivers, and with anti-virus software such as Virex, for example, in the past with earlier OS updates, with resulting effects on battery life, computer heat, and general operating speed.

If your HD was close to full when you installed Snow Leopard you should also consider the possibility that the installation will have greatly increased free space fragmentation on the drive. All OS update installations do this, though it doesn't matter when the drive has plenty of room on it. If you were down to your last 10% free space or the like , though, this can cause significant problems, including a major increase in HD activity with consequent reduction of battery run time.

These things won't "fix" a dying battery, but they will reduce the stress on it, improving charge life and reducing the risk of sudden shut-downs.

Finally, I'd suggest you take your battery along to an Apple AASP or a Apple Store and get it tested. This doesn't place you under any obligation to buy a new one, but it does give you a much more accurate picture of its current status than you can get from the built in battery monitoring software under either Leopard or Snow Leopard.

Cheers

Rod

Guys,

I have been following this forum since beginning, jumping in from time to time, I am one of those who use to say it's a OS bug, had same issue, went to Apple, got a replacement batter for free, even if it was out of warranty, because cycle count was low, but I did get the same type of battery, and been told next time I should need to buy one. I have been since then working happily with the new battery with no issues, but, I did downgrade to 10.5

Well, after some more research, and looking at all your posts here, I think this is what is happening, and please Rod take into consideration this view:

1) We all probably have same or similar type of battery, it may not be the best battery, but was working more or less fine. Batteries usually provide a limit of amps along with the voltage, and exceeding that amp consume, can overheat the device.

2) Then it comes Snow Leopard, and for first time I kind of agree with Rod (don't get too excited), I believe there is not such a bug, well, not as we think a bug is, our batteries really die. The main problem is, probably Snow Leopard is just making the MBP use more CPU and resources, yeah, runs faster, but at the price of amps consume, and that is making our average battery to struggle, get overheated, failing cells (probably reason of sudden drop on charge/performance), and in some cases (that is probably the reason of un-warning shut downs), bulky batteries making bad connection, that happened to me just before I got the new one actually.

Of course a nearly done battery under this circumstances is going to die very soon. And of course some people on this forum really had bad batteries before upgrading to Snow Leopard. But I believe most of us did really not had bad batteries before upgrading.

This is just my theory, I am not saying now the solution is buying a new battery, the thing is, we most of all had a MBP running fine with this battery under Leopard, then after upgrading, our batteries just fried.

I think Apple didn't do too much testing on this new OS, they should have, and in this case, they should have say there were incompatibilities with a particular type of hardware (our batteries).

I still believe it's Apple responsibility, but I also believe there will be no such a fix, cos the only fix at the moment maybe, is just redo again the whole OS and make it not consume so much energy, which I believe is never going to happen.

So in a way, when Rod and people like him suggest to buy a new battery, well, it seems if you want to run Snow Leopard, yes, you need to buy a new battery, even if not fare, just be sure is not the same type of battery but some new generation ones.

But there are other solutions, like not upgrading at all, downgrade to Leopard, which run just fine, there are no really major differences on the new OS, besides what they try to sell us. I am a software developer using the computer a lot, and found no advantages at all using Snow Leopard during period I used it, I did actually had more than problems, which I am not going to post here.
It's just a waste of money what we spent on the upgrade, but still, it's cheaper that a new battery, some of us could probably return the upgrade, and some others may be able to sell it.

But that is just my opinion. I hope I am wrong and Apple releases a fix to be honest, but been realistic I don't think it's going to happen, so downgrading is probably our best shoot until all this get cleared.

Sorry, forgot to add, worst case scenario is, your battery is already fried by Snow Leopard, so in this case there is no solution, not even downgrade, maybe try to get a free replacement and then downgrade.

Sorry Rod,
maybe I just over estimated you....
I phoned to Apple support yesterday and THEY (your untouchable GOD, APPLE) told me that the bug is present and they are going to fix it! They confirmed everything!
When I ask them why the first time they suggest me to change my battery and why they didn't recognize the presence of the bug, they was very embarrassed and they repeat that Apple is going to fix it!
The key for make them mouth to speak was to tell them about the email from LastMac!

Rod wake up please, you're annoying, really.

_*"There's a bug, they recognized it"*_ - on 01/27/2010 at 14:00 Italian time.

Repeat it like a "mantra", it could help you!

Add me to the list of MBP's that seem to suffer from this ailment. Here are my stats:

Hardware Overview:
Model Identifier: MacBookPro3,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.2 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP31.0070.B07
SMC Version (system): 1.16f11

Battery Information:
Model Information:
Manufacturer: Sony
Device name: ASMB012
Pack Lot Code: 0003
PCB Lot Code: 0000
Firmware Version: 102a
Hardware Revision: 0500
Cell Revision: 0303
Charge Information:
Charge remaining (mAh): 1283
Fully charged: Yes
Charging: No
Full charge capacity (mAh): 1283
Health Information:
Cycle count: 52
Condition: Check Battery
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA): 133
Voltage (mV): 12610

Kinda wish I'd read all this sooner, but you never realize there's anything wrong till something goes wrong, like the laptop completely shutting down at 73% charge. No warning. And yes, I have tried all the suggestions, up to replacing the battery. That'll happen if/when I switch back to 10.5 which I'd rather not do at this stage in the game. Hopefully Apple has finally realized there's a problem and the fix will be along soon.