Real World Workflow

This car shoot was extremely long and cold. Everywhere, from SF to Moab and Telluride I was constantly battling shorter battery life, weird display issues and the random camera gremlins that pop up whenever you have freezing temps. (Hey PhaseOne–dunking your backs in liquid nitrogen and showing how they’ll still work after thawing is great, but did you freeze the battery too? Just wondering because we went through a ton of 2500mah batteries that were barely lasting an hour, fully charged, in the cold.)

On the way out to SF I had noticed something amiss with my MBP’s battery, in that it was not holding a charge for long at all. A quick check of the system profiler revealed a “check battery” status, that had me concerned. Given that most of the locations I had my own genny and a few backup machines, I wasn’t too worried about it and filed it away for a future troubleshooting session. (Yes, I had been calibrating the battery, and it only had about 160 cycles, so it shouldn’t have been dead to the world). After a few weeks of trying to recalibrate and removing replacing the battery, I was almost down to a quick 20mins of runtime before shutdown. Adding to this, I noticed a weird bump in my trackpad that I could only attribute to the super cold temps we were experiencing, even though I tried to minimize outside exposure as much as possible. All of this came to a head in the Denver airport where all of a sudden I had no keyboard or trackpad and a battery that was more useful as a paperweight than as a power source.

Upon getting home and settled in, I started thinking that if both the keyboard and trackpad were out, it could very well be a connection issue since the odds of both failing at the same time are very low. A quick web search revealed that the trackpad connector is outside of the case, under–you guessed it the battery! I turned the machine over, popped out the battery and used a small precision screwdriver to reseat the trackpad connector, which did look a little loose. While the battery was out I gave it’s contacts a quick squirt of contact cleaner on the outside chance it could be a dirty contact or corrosion causing my problem. I powered back up and…

Voila!

Son of Spanky (the machine’s name) is back in business. Rock On. The funky bump is even gone on the trackpad, though that might come back to bite me later.

Oh, if you click the coconut icon at the top of the post, it takes you to the Coconut Battery App website, where you’ll find a nifty little app that show you your battery status and cycle states as well as additional info that comes in very handy when troubleshooting battery issues. Highly recommended.