Duo battery goofiness.

[Anonymous Freak]

Just got my Duo 280c out of storage, and decided to test out a recently acquired Type I battery.

Oddly, right off the bat, the Duo would refuse to run at all if the battery was even inserted, much less running directly from the battery. A Power Manager and PRAM reset fixed that problem, but the battery goes from being 'empty' to 'full' in about 30 seconds.

I try to run Battery Recondition, and the screen flickers for about 10 seconds, then turns all the way off, while I get speaker static for 10-20 more seconds. Then the system is off. Turns back on fine, though. After trying this a couple times, I decided to see if the battery was holding any charge.

So the odd thing is that when I remove power, the backlight immediately turns off, but I can still see that the LCD itself is on, although the mouse doesn't move. Within 5 more seconds, the LCD itself turns off. Oddly, if I then plug power back in (within about 10 seconds of the LCD shutting off,) it acts as if the system had been running fine the whole time. (i.e. it wasn't asleep, it didn't turn off.) If I let it sit for more than 10 seconds, the system has completely died. But if I hit the power switch, it will try to boot. Sometimes it dies immediately after the startup sound, other times it makes it to the Happy Mac. Invariably, it dies before even getting to "Welcome to Macintosh", though.

I also have a PowerBook 100 that I have dug out of storage that works great, but has a completely dead battery. The battery is a third-party replacement that appears to be NiCad instead of Lead-acid. Anyone know of any 'how to rebuild a PB100 NiCad' tutorials? (I'm probably going to rebuild the Duo battery, since I know it does at least TRY to work.)

 

[Quadraman]

Not sure about rebuilding PB 100 batteries, but I know if you can find NiMH cells of the same size as those in the NiCad battery, you will end up with longer battery life. Get cells with the highest mAH rating you can find as most laptop battery suppliers use the cheap ones that don't hold as much juice.

 

[beachycove]

What this shows is that there's a flicker of life in them thar cells.

It might be worth your while to work on that battery a bit longer. I have a Type 3 battery that began more or less like yours, but that I can now get fully 2 hours charge out of on a 68030 Duo with all its power saving features enabled. Not bad for a set of cells from the early-to-mid 90s. (On a 280c, the charge is more like 80 mins., so it was not for nothing that the 280c required a 36W as opposed to the older 24W Duo adapter.)

I should add, mind you, that I have not had such luck in rehabilitating several Type 1 batteries that I have lying around. But most of them are unlike yours in that they show no signs of life at all.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Yeah, I've recovered 'dead' batteries before, after a night of futzing, I'm now up to about 1 minutes of 'usable' before it goes goofy.