Laptop Battery

My laptop is nearing a decade old and it has been in sore need of some care. To do this I bought a replacement battery and a laptop cleaning set from iFixit.

I started by cleaning the laptop using the kit, the cleaning spray work well as it lifted the gunk off easily and the microfibre cloth made the screen look like new. I haven’t included any images because I am embarrassed at how bad I let the machine get.

Replacing the battery was surprisingly trivial, I just needed to unscrew the back and the old battery then re-screw the new battery and the back.

I hadn’t added a battery indicator to my operating system bar, since it was pointless as the old battery couldn’t hold a charge any more. Once again I am impressed with Quickshell, as it makes it quite easy to create a fully custom graphical shell. See how easy it is to add a battery indicator, below. You can see my previous post on Quickshell for more details.

import QtQuick
import Quickshell.Services.UPower

Rectangle {
    color: ""
    height: 30
    width: text.contentWidth > 0 ? text.contentWidth + 8 : 0

    Text {
        id: text
        anchors.centerIn: parent
        font.pixelSize: 16
        function getBatteryIcon(level_step: real, charging = false): string {
            if (charging) {
                if (level_step === 0) { return "󰢜"; }
                if (level_step === 10) { return "󰂆"; }
                if (level_step === 20) { return "󰂇"; }
                if (level_step === 30) { return "󰂈"; }
                if (level_step === 40) { return "󰢝"; }
                if (level_step === 50) { return "󰂉"; }
                if (level_step === 60) { return "󰢞"; }
                if (level_step === 70) { return "󰂊"; }
                if (level_step === 80) { return "󰂋"; }
                if (level_step >= 90) { return "󰂅"; }
            }

            if (level_step === 0) { return "󰁺"; }
            if (level_step === 10) { return "󰁻"; }
            if (level_step === 20) { return "󰁼"; }
            if (level_step === 30) { return "󰁽"; }
            if (level_step === 40) { return "󰁾"; }
            if (level_step === 50) { return "󰁿"; }
            if (level_step === 60) { return "󰂀"; }
            if (level_step === 70) { return "󰂁"; }
            if (level_step === 80) { return "󰂂"; }
            if (level_step >= 90) { return "󰁹"; }
            return "󰂃";
        }

        text: {
            if (!UPower.displayDevice.isLaptopBattery) {
                return "";
            }

            let level_step = Math.floor(UPower.displayDevice.percentage * 10) * 10;
            let level = Math.floor(UPower.displayDevice.percentage * 100);
            let charging = [UPowerDeviceState.Charging, UPowerDeviceState.FullyCharged, UPowerDeviceState.PendingCharge].includes(UPower.displayDevice.state);
            return getBatteryIcon(level_step, charging) + " " + level;
        }
        color: !UPower.onBattery || UPower.displayDevice.percentage > 0.2 ? "" : ""
    }
}

I wanted to be able to set the maximum charge of the battery to increase its longevity. The current applesmc driver does not support this but I found applesmc-next by c— which advertised setting this. However the module has not been updated for Linux 7 and crashes on the latest kernel, which I found out the hard way. After instead installing patch #15 it worked.

Now my laptop is once again ready for use, and for a fraction of the cost of a new machine. I hope that I can use it for many more years to come.