Batteries and OSX?

After installing iAtkos a few weeks ago, I got my 6 cell from mambate in the mail today. After hearing of others getting burned on the capacity with mambate batteries, I immediately opened system profiler to check the battery specs. It raised a few questions about how OSX handles our batteries?

For one, the battery meter usually indicates 2 hrs on a fully charged 3 cell. This is lower than the performance I've had in Linpus/XP/Fedora. However, since I'm constantly turning the display off during my on and off use I have no idea what the machine is actually getting on the 3 cell. I consistently pulled 2.5 hrs with the other OS.

Enter the 6 cell. System profiler indicated 4200 or so, indicating I may have received the fabled 4400 mambate bust. Decided to give it a shot before demanding a replacement or refund. Out of curiousity I put in the OEM 3 cell. Profiler indicates just over 1800mah. I have full faith that the OEM battery rating off 2200 is accurate, so this raises some question over how the battery is seen by OSX? Also, I may not have a bum battery from mambate after all.

Finally, battery charging with OSX running is PAINFULLY slow. The 3 cell charged reasonably quick under XP/Linpus, etc but seems to crawl with OSX running. Times still remain normal when charging with the machine off.

Does anyone else have any insight or experience? I searched pretty hard for info on this stuff, so if it exists it's not easy to find. Maybe this can become a central source for the osx86 running AAO folks.

 

Are you running the vanilla kernel?

If so, you could try running VoodooPower - might have better laptop power support for you. Check out SuperHai on InsanelyMac.

 

Was using vanilla and voodoo power at first, but removed voodoo power due to the audio issues. Now I'm on voodoo kernel with voodoo power reinstalled and see similar battery times as before.

My main concern is actually over the battery readouts in system profiler. However, I ran a bootable usb copy of fedora and saw the same readouts I got in osx regarding capacity. So not only does it look like I have the fake mambate 5200, but my OEM 3 cell only stores around 1800mah. Not a good sign in either case.

 

How old is the 3-cell battery?

The there is a fix for the superhai kext's for the audio problems while running of battery. Please have a look at SbM's tutorial on iAtkos 10.5.6.