In sympathy with the overheating Sony-manufactured laptop batteries used in Dell and Apple laptops (funny that Sony's own Vaio range was unaffected), my iBook battery decided to suffer the equivalent of a stroke.

Started noticing it a few days ago when for the first time in a while I actually used the computer as a laptop, and not as a portable: battery life went down to below 50% and then suddenly dropped to 1%, and the laptop went to sleep soon after that.

The second time it happened was worse - the reserve charge was totally depleted by the time I plugged it back in, and the system clock was reset to 1969 (funny that. I thought it's stored in non-volatile RAM).

Every cloud has a silver lining, though: after running the battery down to 1% and sleep mode again today, OS X seems to have finally recalibrated the battery. Recharging it, it went up quickly to about 59% and then get stuck, very slowly inching to, currently, 60%. I still get 2 hours+ on it, which is not too bad for a 2-year-old. If no further deterioration occurs this can probably last me until next spring (yum, 64-bit Leopard Macbook goodness).

Would I be crazy if I go ahead with selling my HP laptop now? Would be a good idea to do it *now* while the new dual-core Turion 64 chip is still relatively hard to find.