I recently bought one of Powerbookmedic's dual clamshell iBook battery chargers but I don't have a manual. What do the blinking red, yellow, and green lights mean on this thing? Thanks.

Green means the battery is fully charged. Amber means the battery is charging. Flashing amber or flashing red, or red alone means the battery is dead.

-Bradley
Powerbookmedic.com

I just bought an extra battery and a dual battery charger for my ibook. I put the new battery on the dual battery charger and it won't stop flashing red. Will it ever start charging or do I need to install it into my ibook and initially charge it there first? Thanks

I'm having the same problem with my new charger. It keeps flashing red with my old battery in there. It flashes 6 times pauses 6 flashes etc. this is after I first atach the battery when it holds yellow for about a minute.

Exactly same problem here (6 flashes then pause). I guess our batteries are dead...

i got the same indications when i plugged in my old battery into my new vst charger, so i left the battery plugged in for a about ten hours and it brought the power level back to full charge.

I just bought a VST charger. Two semi-dead Pismo batteries are sitting in it. If a single weak battery is brought back to life by it (as happened to rizzi1) then that charger has paid for its cost. But is that likely or was rizzi1 just lucky?

I have a pile of 8-10 dead or weak Pismo batteries. Some are totally dead, so they can't even get to one LED with power, while others charge to one or even four LEDs but doesn't last more than a few minutes. Despite a lot of experimenting with all ways to reset batteries etc, I still don't understand how to treat them. More than once, a battery has gone from 2 hour capacity to nothing with a single discharge. What am I doing wrong? Maybe my mistake is simply to expect my batteries to last longer, I don't know.

Follow-up...

Two batteries suddenly jumped from dead to four LEDs, and they seem to work. (I havn't used them for long, but at least they could power up a Powerbook and run for some time - definitely not dead). They were first sitting in Powerbooks, then in the VST for about two weeks, when I took them out, charged another two, and put them in again. The next morning they gave green light!

That alone is good enough. It seems to have blown some life into two that were working but that I thought were too bad to use.

I am starting to believe that many good batteries are deemed dead from Apple's flawed "intelligent battery" system, but they can be tricked back to life. I am just not sure how.