Holy diversions! That’s the trouble with cats.. they take over EVERYTHING. Even this thread
To the OP; 4 hours is a fantastic run for an ancient lithium ion battery, but you can also try a few things to improve upon this;
1. Set performance to “longer battery life” in energy saver settings.
2. Switch off power to the Airport Card if it has one. (Also Bluetooth if it has it)
3. Dim the display.
4. If you know you’re not using the hard drive for extended periods. E.g. You are typing for a long period of time, set the drive to spin down during inactivity.
5. Again, lower the spindown delay to 1 minute using ‘pmset’ in the Terminal (if that existed in Puma).
6. Install a 32GB or 64GB mSATA SSD in an IDE adapter to remove the spinning disk altogether.
7. Set your desktop picture to solid white (this is only a theoretical improvement to reduce the LCD’s energy consumption used in darkening pixels, but I haven’t tested to see if it actually makes a difference)
8. For Tiger or Leopard, remove the AudioIPCDriver.kext extension to reduce CPU consumption when idle. (I now do this on all of my PowerPC Macs during setup)
9. Make sure the machine is adequately cooling. Allow it to breathe. Don’t cover up the vents or you’re asking the internal fans to run harder than they should need to.
10. Use a laptop stand to keep it running cool.
11. Repaste the CPU with a quality thermal compound and renew the thermal pads. This will improve the overall thermal performance, reducing the fan requirements and saving energy.
12. Avoid using powered devices like USB, Firewire or a PCMCIA card.
13. Load your regular use apps and documents onto a RAM disk and operate from there. See Esperance DV here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/finally-found-a-use-for-a-ram-disk.2027295/
(This May not work in Puma, but there might be an older copy).
14. This also brings up the point of maxing out your RAM to reduce swap / memory paging hitting your hard disk.
Can anyone think of any other tips for longer battery life?
It’s also worth fully draining, then fully recharging the battery without interruption to calibrate it’s internal power management controller.
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I ordered another non-working Titanium to use for rebuilding my latest hard knock life 867. It also has a Garamond “PowerBook G4” label but the seller provided no specs and says it doesn’t boot. Maybe I’ll get lucky and score a 1Ghz unit with 64MB VRAM that I can take the logic board from. Either way another AU$30 (plus shipping) spent on TiBooks.. this is quickly adding up!
I just did a quick headcount and there are 25 Apple laptops in my home with 6 currently undergoing repairs.