EveryJoe » Battery

Monitor Your Mac’s Battery Health

Juan Magdaraog — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:02:33 +0000

Spurred by my recent battery problems, I stumbled upon this little app from Sonora Graphics. It’s called Battery Health Monitor. It’s a free app that allows you to monitor your MacBook Pro, MacBook, PowerBook and iBook’s battery life.

Battery Health Monitor Screen shot

It shows you the original capacity, current capacity, current charge, charge cycles, voltage and some more info. From this you can see how your battery is doing, if you need to change it, etc.

Granted these information can be found through System profiler, I just like it better when there’s a GUI to look at. Plus what am I gonna fill up my hard disk with but with tons of Mac apps. Right?

Download Battery Health Monitor here. It’s a free download.

Post from: EveryJoe

Monitor Your Mac’s Battery Health

MacBook Pro Disappointing Experience

Juan Magdaraog — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:14:45 +0000

I love almost all things about my MacBook Pro, except the battery life. I’ve been reading about it in several forums/web sites and it seems that the poor battery life affects mostly the 2.53 ghz models. The 2.4 ghz model seems to be getting a decent battery life.

However I discovered that it may not be the battery at all. It may be something else. I brought my battery to my neighborhood Apple Certified Service Center to have them check it and they loaned me a spare battery, it was the same. I was still only getting slightly over 1 hour and 30 mins with my MacBook Pro. This is unacceptable!

Just a week ago I was getting a decent 2 hours and 30 mins with the dedicated 9600M NVDIA graphics card, WiFi turned on and brightness at 3/4 setting.

So it’s not the battery but something else that’s causing this. What? I don’t know. I have yet to find out.

How’s your Unibody MacBook Pro battery life? Please share it with me and let me know as well if you’re happy or disappointed with what you’re getting.

Post from: EveryJoe

MacBook Pro Disappointing Experience

Power Policy With Laptop Docking Stations

Sravan — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:15:01 +0000

I use an old Lenovo T60 and like to grumble about its performance. I’m sure the feeling is mutual. I also use a docking station at work. Makes life simpler. Recently, I had a problem with the way it powers the laptop.

The laptop had been docked, but the power supply unplugged due to some neighbourly reasons. When I restarted the laptop, it simply shutdown. When I powered it again, it brusquely answered with a series of flickers across three of its LEDs (power supply, battery life and something else that I don’t remember now) in a most NSFW manner. The laptop won’t start. I had read it as a signal to get a new laptop.

Upon undocking the laptop, going home, and powering it on again, it worked! Was my laptop for once being helpful? Enabling me to idle away my time in the office?

I was naturally suspicious. Upon further investigation, the following has been established: A docked laptop uses the power provided through the docking station while booting and won’t use the battery power. An undocked laptop, and a docked non-booting laptop can use the battery power.

Do you have more light to shed about this issue? Do you think it is a sweeping generalization?

Post from: EveryJoe

Power Policy With Laptop Docking Stations