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MACBOOK UPDATE….Thanks to everyone who suggested resetting the SMC controller in my MacBook. It didn’t work, but it did cause the white LED on the front of the notebook to start pulsing again, which made me think it was working for a while and allowed me to go to bed happy. When I woke up this morning, though, the battery was still dead after a night of charging and the message on the menu bar was actually more ominous than before. Sigh. Off to the Genius Bar, I guess.

But I’m curious about something. An awful lot of people in yesterday’s thread seemed to think that I had committed some kind of technological malpractice by letting the battery discharge completely. Mind you, this wasn’t deliberate on my part. I just closed the lid one day (August 29, I think, after using the MacBook to blog about Sarah Palin during a power failure) and then didn’t happen to use it for the next two or three months. But frankly, even if I’d known I wasn’t going to use it I wouldn’t have done anything special. I would have just figured that the battery would discharge completely and I’d have to charge it before I used it next. No big deal.

But that’s not so? If you let your battery discharge completely, the entire machine dies and refuses to charge the battery again? Why? Just to teach me a lesson? Or what? I don’t understand why completely discharging a battery should have such dire effects. I thirst for knowledge, as always, so can anyone enlighten me?

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The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

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