Hello my macanese peers.

This may be a dumbass question, but I don't want to waste $150. Since upgrading to Leopard my laptop(specs in sig)'s battery life has went down from about one a half hours to about 45 minutes. If I was to replace the current battery with a new one, what sort of battery life would I get?

Thanks in advance,
Whatever it says the poster's name is.

My 13" macbook gets about 5 hours, my father's 17" powerbook gets about 4 hours. The way in which you use the machine will determine greatly what amount of battery lift you will get.

I usually have bluetooth and wifi on. I just browse the web and use my handy Logitech V270 Bluetooth mouse.

Good to talk to a Gmail user!

yeah, we always work with bluetooth & wifi turned on; can't be bothered turning it off

in that case, with a new battery you *should* be looking easily at 4-5 hours, typically over 5:30 i'd say, unless they give you a bit of a dodgy battery.

i just looked on streetwise and this is what it says:
Buy an extra battery to double your battery life when traveling.
The Apple Rechargeable Battery for 15-inch Aluminum PowerBook G4 is a 50 watt-hour lithium ion battery that provides up to 4.5 hours of operation depending on battery saving features used and system configuration.

Note: Compatible with 15-inch Aluminum PowerBook G4 only.

do you really think I'll get 5 and a half hours?

My battery gets about 2-2.5 hours with the Wi-Fi on all the time. This is a MacBook too. I usually do a battery recondition often too which seems to help restore it's health.

Hey, sorry but i'd just like to bump this thread because I really want to know what sort of battery life I would achieve from a replacement battery.

No-one can guarantee you or tell you exactly what sort of battery life you will get. It really does depend on the individual user (type of use and the configuration of your Mac). If you don't have much RAM, OS X will regularly access the HD and battery life will be not as good as it might be. You like to play DVD's? That is not going to give you long battery life either. Will you get 5.5 hours? No; that just has to be an upper limit. Most people would not get that.

You should get about 3 to 3.5 hours of real world usage with wireless and surfing/iTunes, etc... nothing intensive.

Buy a spare battery or bring the charger with you.

Question?

How old is the Macbook. There was an issue with Batteries recently and you may qualify for a replacement, which would work out cheaper.

You should be getting 3-5 hrs battery life.

Lol.

This is a 15" Aluminium PowerBook 1.25Ghz with 512MB of RAM and a 80GB hard drive. It was purchased in March 2003. It's battery has not been replaced since the purchase. I work with bluetooth off and the brightness at the lowest possible (1 dot)

Just buy the replacement battery, as 45 minutes is crap, so anything above that will be a bonus for $150.

What do you do to recondition your battery?

If cost is a factor you can always consider buying a Chinesey battery from eBay which will probably have the same or greater capacity than the OEM version for about half the cost delivered.

Hmm... I'd rather pay more for a battery from Streetwise than gamble with eBay. Especially the Chinesey sellers :d

I appreciate your comments.