Capacity Meter 1.1.1 review
DownloadCapacity Meter displays and tracks information about your PowerBooks battery, including capacity, amperage, current, and voltage.
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Capacity Meter displays and tracks information about your PowerBooks battery, including capacity, amperage, current, and voltage. Using this information and your machine's specifications, Capacity Meter will let you know the current status of your battery and track degradation over time.
The capacity of a battery is the amount of charge it can hold. As batteries age and get charged and discharged repeatedly, the capacity diminishes. For example, a brand new 12" PowerBook is supposed to have a battery capacity of 4600mah, but over time, this figure will drop dramatically. When this number goes down, don't expect to get the 4 hours of battery life that Apple quoted.
While this is a characteristic of all batteries, Mac OS X does not include software to help you monitor this change. This is where Capacity Meter comes into play. Capacity Meter records your capacity as a percentage of its original state and rates the battery as follows:
Excellent - %100 - %80
Good - %79 - %60
Fair - %59 - %40
Poor - %39 - %20
Very Poor - %19 - %0
Basically, once you've reached below %60 capacity, you are barely getting more than half of the battery life of your machine as when it was new. While you may not be able to use your machine for multiple hours at a time anymore, wether you want to replace your battery to rectify this, is completely up the the individual user.
Apple has been known to replace batteries that have significantly degraded over time. By monitoring your batteries capacity, you will always be aware of your batteries current condition. This could come in handy, as you may be able to request a replacement from Apple if your machine is still under warranty.
What's New:
Tiger compatible
Fixed issues with the 10.3.8 update.
Requirements:
Mac OS X 10.1 or later
PowerBook G3 or later.
Capacity Meter 1.1.1 keywords