Battery charging up to 6% Powerbook G4 12" 1ghz.

Question

Battery charging up to 6% Powerbook G4 12" 1ghz.

Hi,

I recently purchased a 12" Powerbook G4 DVI and it has been great untill I started having problems with the battery.

The owner stated that the battery was dead and I was going to purchase a new one until I found out that the battery has only been through 91 charge cycles.

I have reset the PRAM as well as the NVRAM and PMU but still no luck.

The battery charges up to 6% until it goes rediculesly slow and states that charging will take 3069:48 untill full.

Also, the owner stated that the laptop had not been used for over one year.

Could someone please shed some light into this topic.

Regards

Peter

PowerBook, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Mar 22, 2012 5:01 AM

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Answer 1

BGreg

Level 6

17,558 points

Mar 22, 2012 5:42 AM in response to PetersPowermacG4

Is the battery an Apple battery, OWC, or likely a cheap e-bay knock off? Agree that 91 cycles is awfully low for a battery issue, however, there have been crap batteries through e-bay that have failed quickly.

If the battery isn't at fault, then it's a board issue inside the Powerbook, assuming that the charger is working correctly, which it sounds like it is.

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Answer 2

Allan Jones

Level 9

77,954 points

Mar 22, 2012 8:39 AM in response to PetersPowermacG4

The other possibility is it is the original battery and, with only 91 cycles, has died from lack of use. For decent life, a battery should be getting at least one cycle a week (~50/year). If the computer was new in, say 2003 and the orig battery has 91 cycles, that's 10/year, a premature death sentence,

More batteries around here die from too little use than too much.

You may be able to tell if there is an electrical fault in teh battery with System Profiler (In Applicaitons > Utilities) by selecting "Power" from the left-hand Contents pane:

If the values for "Charge Remaining (mah)" and "Full Charge Capacity (mah)" show 5-digit numbers in the range of 62000, the battery has completely failed.

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