MacBook Pro battery capacity 65K mAh

Question

I have a 15" MacBook Pro 3.1 (that is Late 2007 model AFAIR). I've bought it new a couple of years ago.

Recently its on-battery power lifespan became very short (30 to 10 minutes).

When my notebook turns itself off due to "low battery" and I press the small button on the battery itself, all LED lights are alight, indicating full charge.

When I plug in the power adapter, my Mac displays that "battery is fully charged, finishing charging process" (I have a Russian OS X 10.5.7, so that is a rough translation), but the LEDs on battery itself display (seemingly accurate) status that there are one or two "LEDs still not charged".

My battery have as few as 37 recharge cycles (yes, I've neglected calibration over the time I've used it). Battery info programs like iBatt2 report battery capacity of 65 337 mAh (with by-design capacity of 5600 mAh).

I get it that something went wrong with battery electronics.

I've tried resetting my Mac's PRAM and SMC, it did not changed anything.

Now I'm trying to recalibrate the battery, but looks like it does not help as well. Will try to recalibrate it several times in a row.

I'd buy a new battery if I knew if it is battery fault, not a notebook's.

Any suggestions?

Update:

After recalibration, my battery status now displays battery capacity of 1500 mAh. But with every recalibration (or simply when I use notebook without power adapter plugged in) this number changes in the range from 200 mAh to 1700 mAh.

LEDs on battery now are synchronous with what nodebook thinks on the charge level.

Also I've noticed that cycle count changes rather slowly. It is now 39, it was 37 when I've started recalibration, and I went through the process at least ten times...

So, the main question is: does it look like that replacing the battery would help me (or does it look like this is notebook's problem)? I guess I should try replacing the battery.

Answer 1

Battery issues are not much related to NVRAM/PRAM, but to the SMC. See Apple Portables: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC).

If this is the first time you calibrated your battery: after I purchased a new battery, my Mac would shutdown suddenly when the battery was running low, even after calibration. For some reason, it took me a few calibrations to fix that. I can't explain why, and it's quite likely that something else fixed it, but in the end the chip on the battery finally learned the true capacity of the battery. So, maybe one or two more calibrations might help...

Answer 2

I had the same problem on my 2006 MacBook pro and it turned out that some batteries manufactured around 2006/2007 were simply broken by production.

IIRC, at that time Apple had published an official announcement to replace batteries without cost for computers that qualified for the change. I checked the website and found out that my battery qualified for a change but my computer did not :-(.

Nevertheless, after replacing the battery by a new one everything works just fine.