interesting macbook problem

[jbusc]

I was using my macbook tonight when I noticed something interesting: the little battery indicator says it was fully charged, even though I had been running it on battery for hours all day long. coconutbattery agreed.

I figured I would go and plug it into the magsafe and see if it corrected itself, and I went over and docked it into my computer. But then, my external LCD would not work! I would plug it in via mini-DVI (plus my usb keyboard/mouse) and it would come out of sleep, flash the desktop for a second, and then go back to sleep. Weird.

so I just undocked it and rebooted it, and now everythings fine. So...what happened?

On a lighter note is it normal for the battery capacity to go up over time? coconutbattery initially reported my macbook battery capacity to be the shipping 5200 mAh, but now it's nearly up to 5300 mAh and still increasing. Or is this related to the weird battery indicator issue above?

specs:
white MB 2GHz, superdrive
2GB patriot RAM, 3rd party-working beautfully (I guess?)
original shipping firmware (no firmware updates), all other software updated.

 

[mad jew]

Hmm... Battery capacity may go up if you calibrate the battery, although it also may go down. What's really happening when you calibrate the battery is that the computer is gauging a more accurate sum of the battery's capacity. If the computer was underestimating the capacity pre-calibration, then the capacity will appear to go up post-calibration.

Just out of interest, why haven't you installed the firmware updates? I'd install them if I were you.

 

[jbusc]

well, given that I didn't have any problems at all really (except for this strange occurance), I wanted to wait a while and see what people said about the firmware update before I go ahead and apply it.

 

[mad jew]

Fair enough. Maybe now would be a good time to install it though.