BatteryAmnesia 1.3.1
by
Jeremy Kezer

What is it?

BatteryAmnesia is a utility for any PowerBook that uses a nickel-cadmium (NiCad) battery or Nickel-Hydride (NiMH) battery.  Over time, these batteries are susceptible to a "memory effect", which can reduce their battery capacity.  The memory effect can be cured by fully discharging the battery before recharging it.

The Apple PowerBook manual recommends a method for discharging your battery, by running your PowerBook on battery power until it shuts down, manually dismissing the low battery warnings that periodically pop up.  The big drawback with this technique is that you have to be present to dismiss the low battery warning dialogs when they come up.  Also, the PowerBook software will put itself to sleep "softly" before it is completely discharged.

BatteryAmnesia provides a safe, fast and automatic way to deep discharge your PowerBook's battery.  BatteryAmnesia automatically bypasses the low battery warning dialogs, and prevents the "soft" sleep brought on by those dialogs.  Instead, BatteryAmnesia will run your PowerBook's battery down until the "hard" hardware shutdown occurs, which is at a lower voltage.  This provides a better discharge.

Once you tell BatteryAmnesia to begin the discharge cycle, it will drain the battery as fast as possible, by using as much power as it can.  The screen backlighting is automatically increased to maximum, CPU "resting" is prevented, and the hard drive is prevented from spinning down.

Features

•  Allows unattended deep discharging of your PowerBook's battery.
•  Provides visual and audible indicators of how the discharge cycle is proceeding.
•  Runs the PowerBook until the "hard" hardware shutdown occurs, providing the best discharge.
•  Activates all power-consuming features of your PowerBook to speed up the discharge cycle.
•  Automatically quits all applications to prevent any potential loss of data.

BatteryAmnesia is shareware!

BatteryAmnesia is a shareware product.  If you find it useful, please consider paying the shareware fee.  Not only will you help to support my efforts, but by becoming a registered user, I will notify you by email of future versions.  Please see the "Registration form" chapter in this document for more information.

Also, feel free to share this program with your friends!

Name change

In a previous life, BatteryAmnesia was known as DeepDischarge.  So if you happen to come across an older version with that name, you can safely ignore it.