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More Power

I’m beginning to realize that I’ve become obsessed with my laptop’s battery life. With the 3 year warranty having just ended, I’ve been trying to figure out just what was causing the sudden exponential drop in juice before Apple refused to cover any of it. Several trips to the Apple Store and I wound up with bupkis, except my new obsession.

I ordered a “Newertech NuPower” battery from Other World Computing. OWC is my favorite choice for Mac stuff and I trust them for their service and quality. These batteries had a larger capacity and lasted about an hour longer than my old batteries ever did. I was amazed and then I was annoyed. Why? The NuPower batteries came up a little short (literally). They’re about ~1cm short of the original Tibook battery, which caused all kinds of mayhem. I’d pick her up only to hear the “clic-unk” of the hard drive and power shutting off. It seems that one centimeter really makes a difference.

OWC recognized the problem and recommended this was their suggestion.

I was a little upset…but I tried it with two different rounds of batteries. It just started happening less and I started losing real data. Now I was really upset. I hate having to reset the date and time every few hours. That’s just maddening. So back with you! Get thee gone. Back to boring old, reliable OG batteries

On top of it all the hardware troubles I had suspected were still present and I was a week and a half over warranty. I thought I’d risk it and give 1-800-MY-APPLE a try. Thanks to the wonderful Brent I got a fully comped repair. Apple replaced the wiring for the battery and several scorched heatsinks and innards (Yikes!). Harleyquinn (my laptop) is purring nicely again.

So, my obessesion. I’m loving XBattery, of the OWC ordeal. They actually have excellent and detailed instructions on calibrating your battery for maximizing it’s life and capacity. I highly recommend it.