Restore some life to your laptop's battery

Feb 17, '03 07:59:00AM

Contributed by: Marco Cottone

I've found a way to restore partially the duration of the battery of my iBook. It used to last 1hr 30m. Now it lasts more than two hours. Here's how I did it. Work normally using the battery. Wait for the warning about the battery. Open a terminal, you must be an admin user. Type:

 % sudo shutdown now
The password required is that of your account. At the end of shutdown you are in single user mode. Now you can wait until the battery will completely be discharged. You can accelerate the process typing fsck repeatedly.

When the computer turns off, put it in charge mode again. It may be that using this technique more than one time can increase the battery duration more and more. Sorry for my bad English!

[robg adds: I'm sure my [insert any non-English language] is worse than Marco's English! A friend points out that you can replace the fsck with yes > /dev/null, which simply eats processor time, as described in this hint.

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