Here’s my original battery with the two donors:Īnd the same batteries with the cases removed: I’m well aware that they’re not likely to be brand new, but for only $5, it’s still worth trying them for a rebuild. Within a matter of days, I had purchased a Compaq and a Dell battery for $5 each. Not PowerBook batteries - but other batteries at low enough prices that I could cannibalize them for cells. I started watching their auctions for notebook batteries. I get up to Lawrence enough that I buy a trickle of stuff from them, then pick it up when I’m in the neighborhood anyway, and save a bunch of money not having to have things shipped. One of my favorite sellers is a surplus recycling center in Topeka. And since I had a spare battery that was already worthless, I could rebuild the spare without risking damage to my main battery that still mostly worked.īut it turned out I couldn’t find replacement cells at my usual surplus sites - they’re a little larger than AA, which was all I could find. I’m not afraid to dig into things and I’ve rebuilt my original Roomba’s battery before, so I decided to tackle this one myself. Replacement batteries seem to run upwards of $80, and it’s impossible to tell from the online sales pages whether they’re original stock every bit as old as my own failing battery. I’ve run Apple’s battery recalibration procedure several times, but it doesn’t make any difference. Worse, the battery meter still shows upwards of 60% charge remaining when it suddenly powers off with no warning. The second battery’s usable lifespan has slowly decreased from about three hours to around one, even when I turn off power to the AirPort card. I was given two batteries with it, one of which never held a charge at all. It’s starting to feel a little slow when loading bloated web pages, but my main complaint at this point is its battery life. It was given to me used, battered, and obsolete two and half years ago, and after upgrading the RAM to 1G, installing OS X Tiger from a family license, and installing an AirPort card, it has served me well. I do all of my mobile computing - and my blogging slouched on the couch in my family room - using a hand-me-down 500MHz PowerBook G4.