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Poor Battery Life on New Macbook Pro

  • 30-08-2010 6:41pm
    #1
    AdMMM
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 9,472 ✭✭✭


    I bought a MacBook pro less than a month a go, mostly because of the vast battery life. For the first week or so, I was getting great battery life with it often lasting 8+ hours. Suddenly I'm getting less than 3 hours out of a full charge.

    I've checked Activity Monitor and stopped running pretty much every non-essential process but have seen no improvement.

    I haven't installed any software of note before I saw the decline in performance and pretty much just have Chrome running with one tab and minimum brightness.

    Should I be getting more battery life out of such a new MacBook or is this typically the performance of the MacBook battery? I'm just wondering should I send it back to Apple?

    [edit]Just an edit to say that I've tried calibrating the battery based on the instructions on the Apple Support site too but with no visible improvement[/edit]


Comments

  • #2
    Sad Professor
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Arts Moderators, Entertainment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 22,693 CMod ✭✭✭✭Sad Professor


    Download Coconut Battery and see what the reported heath reading is.

    3 hours isn't a lot, but it depends on what you are doing on it for those 3 hours. If you are playing video, especially Flash, it won't last long. You should also make sure the brightness isn't up full.


  • #3
    AdMMM
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 9,472 ✭✭✭AdMMM


    Coconut Battery tells me that my battery is at 97% capacity - i.e. has only lost a bit of its maximum charge.

    I'm literally doing the bare minimum. Brightness is one bar away from darkness and only have Chrome open with one tab (no flash or other embedded video) and Adium running in the background.

    I have noticed that the top left of the body (by the power plug) is running very hot lately when it's under battery power. I used a small car hoover along the back vents in thinking it might have been dust but still no joy or change in operating temperature.

    [edit]
    Ugh, I feel like an idiot. I was only looking at "My Processes". When I selected all Processes, I saw that my printer drivers were raping the CPU for everything it had. Disabled those, so hopefully will see an improvement.
    [/edit]


  • #4
    Sad Professor
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Arts Moderators, Entertainment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 22,693 CMod ✭✭✭✭Sad Professor


    HP printer drivers?


  • #5
    Jev/N
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,456 ✭✭✭Jev/N


    WiFi on? Bluetooth on?

    Dunno how much of a difference on the newer models, but on the older ones it made a big difference


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