BatteryAmnesia is a utility for any PowerBook that uses a nickel-
cadmium (NiCad) battery or Nickel-Hydride (NiMH) battery. Over time,
these batteries are susceptible to a "memory effect", which can reduce
their battery capacity. The memory effect can be cured by fully
discharging the battery before recharging it.
The Apple PowerBook manual recommends a method for discharging your
battery, by running your PowerBook on battery power until it shuts
down, manually dismissing the low battery warnings that periodically
pop up. The big drawback with this technique is that you have to be
present to dismiss the low battery warning dialogs when they come up.
Also, the PowerBook software will put itself to sleep "softly" before
it is completely discharged.
BatteryAmnesia provides a safe, fast and automatic way to deep
discharge your PowerBook's battery. BatteryAmnesia automatically
bypasses the low battery warning dialogs, and prevents the "soft"
sleep brought on by those dialogs. Instead, BatteryAmnesia will run
your PowerBook's battery down until the "hard" hardware shutdown
occurs, which is at a lower voltage. This provides a better discharge.
Once you tell BatteryAmnesia to begin the discharge cycle, it will
drain the battery as fast as possible, by using as much power as it
can. The screen backlighting is automatically increased to maximum,
CPU "resting" is prevented, and the hard drive is prevented from
spinning down.
(v1.5.2)
Compatibility
Architecture: PPC
BatteryAmnesia will run on any PowerBook with a Nicad or NiMH battery.
It will not run on a PowerBook 100 or Macintosh Portable.
BatteryAmnesia can be run on PowerBooks with Lithium-ion batteries
(e.g., PowerBook 3400, iBook, PowerBook G3, PowerBook G4). However,
Li+ batteries are not susceptible to the memory effect, so
BatteryAmnesia doesn't provide any benefits on these models.
