Macbook Pro Battery

manic_man

manic_man

manic_man

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Joined
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Greater Manchester
Hi all,

I'm sure this is a very common question around these parts, but I have just been handed a Macbook Pro that was sat in our office somewhere. It appears to be quite old, the about bit says its a Macbook Pro 2,2.

It has OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard loaded on it.

Basically, the battery seems to have died a death. I'm assuming everyone's answer will be that it needs a new one, but I thought I'd just check I haven't missed anything obvious to try as its likely that it'll just go back into a drawer if that's the case seeing as Apple want £101 for a new one!

At the moment, the power connector goes straight to green when the battery is in, and in the OS it just says "battery critical: not charging". According to the battery stats in the about bit, it has only ever been cycled 7 times, though it also states it has a capacity of 0mAh!

If you take the thing out of the mac for a few hours and press its little round stats button, its bottom LED flashes for a second, and when you put it in, the mac has a think about it for a few seconds cos the charging light goes orange, but then its back to how it was (and the little LED no longer flashes).

I'm assuming this is purely down to under use and the mac just being sat there for so long. But any thoughts on anything I could try would be greatly appreciated :)

(P.S. not a mac buff!)
 
You could try taking it to the Apple shop and see what they say. I've had a battery out of warranty before so it's worth a punt even if it is pushing it a bit for one that old.

What I'm more interested in is it going back in the drawer if it needs a new battery? Does it belong to the company and can't you see if they will sell it to you as not working? £101 to bring a MacBook Pro back to life is an absolute steal don't let it rot in a drawer.
 
The Intel-based Macbooks (like yours) have a System Management Controller which handles stuff like battery & power management.

Might be worth resetting it to see if that helps with your issue.

Think yours has a removable battery - so take it out and press/hold the power button down for 5-10 seconds and put the battery back in.
 
Hi guys,

Thanks for the suggestions, I've done a bit more searching since and installed the battery update package (would only take v 1.2 on this platform), which did seem to do something to the battery, but didn't help things.

have also reset the SMC (possibly, there's no actual confirmation it's worked) and also something else with an acronym I can't remember, but seemed to be akin to doing a BIOS reset. Nothing has helped, its still down as critical.

The problem with it is that, as much as I'd like to take it off their hands, it's technically owned by Janet (the educational network provider) who our team is paid for by, and they are protective of all their equipment. We have laptops in here that are nearly 10 years old that we aren't allowed to dispose of...

Unfortunately, they also almost certainly wont stump up £101 for a new battery on a machine that old (whether its still a good spec or not), and as its very much PSU only now, it's of little use as a laptop except for the odd bit of mac based testing. So it'll be confined back to its drawer. Sad isn't it.

Thanks for the help though guys, pretty sure we can chalk it up as the battery having simply died.
 
Yeah, what a waste. I would certainly ask though if you haven't already. I can only think of two reasons why they would retain stuff a) data protection and b) paying to dispose of electronic waste. If they were happy with you leaving just the hard drive in their possession you would actually be doing them a favour taking it off their hands.
 
Yeah, logic and Janet are not good bedfellows.

The service provided by the team I'm on s dying in a month or so anyway, so we'll see what Janet ask for back I spose ;)
 
IIRC, there were issues with macbook batteries a few years ago.

As others have said, it might be worth taking into an Apple store to see what they say - even though it's out of warranty.

Non Apple batteries are ~ £50?
 
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