Not getting much battery life from MacBook Pro

nesf

25 week old machine, only getting 4 hours out of it at absolute best while running almost no applications on minimum brightness. The hard drive seems to always have some activity going on it, maybe that's it?

Any tips/ideas?

Sad Professor

Check Activity Monitor and see if there are any rogue processes eating up the CPU. iStat Pro, a Dashboard widget, is handy for checking this as well.

Install CoconutBattery to check the health of the battery.

nesf

Battery Health is 95%. No processes leap out at me at taking up much CPU time. Checked both of these before.

Sad Professor

Are you on Lion? I've heard it's much heavier on battery life.

Other than that, try calibrating the battery. Also set "better battery life" in Energy Saver prefs, turn off Bluetooth and stay away from Flash.

Install iStat anyway and keep an eye on the CPU and RAM usage.

nesf

Lion didn't seem to impact battery life much to be honest. Already had iStat installed (love the little graphs in the menu bar).

About 2GB of memory is being used at the moment, over half of that from Safari running 10 tabs. My hard disc also never goes to sleep and is being kept awake by something that I haven't been able to track down.

Nodferatu

hey all, i seem to have a problem similar too, i have just bought macbook pro 15 inch, its a core i7 4GB ram and i seem to get maybe 3 hours at best running just safari or web browsing. the mbp is about 2 weeks old. battery life is HORRIBLE.
i was using FaceTime today with my brother and i was on 49% battery after about 30 - 40 mins chatting it went to down to just 2%. i really cut see any other applications running in activity monitor. maybe FaceTime eats up battery quicker but even still if i was just browsing web battery is still sh*tty. i Always have screen brightness down about two the way or have it up maximum half way. i never use keypad lights so i can't understand. it shows battery life remaining on a fully charge with low screen brightness as 5 hours but that will quickly diminish to 3 or 2 if using even on just web browsing etc 7 hours??? apple is kidding

fasty

I get the advertised 7 hours on my machine when just browsing the web, using mail and IMs, I get maybe 5 if listening to music or downloading.

There's probably something wrong with it. Look up Apple support on how to reset the PMU and calibrate your battery. It might help.

Facetime might enable the more powerful GPUin your MBP which does use a lot more battery power.

atilladehun

To be honest if your computer is still under a year old I'd get it checked out. I had a problem with mine when i got it at first but wasn't sure if it was just me. Finally got it checked out after a couple of weeks and they ended up replacing parts. It ran great then and I wondered why I had waited so long.

Nodferatu

well i decided to look up how to calibrate my battery and did so, seem to be getting a lot better battery time now in the first day of using it. tho when using apps that are heavy on power it zaps battery quicker as expected but light stuff like web surfing seems to pump up the battery life a lot more now. it probably needed to be calibrated from day one but i didn't know that. there was nothing in manual or that i could see that said i should perform a battery calibrating to optimize it. anyhow thanks all.

Hobbes

Saw this a few days ago. Might be related.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191543?start=0&tstart=0

bc dub

Nodferatu wrote: »

hey all, i seem to have a problem similar too, i have just bought macbook pro 15 inch, its a core i7 4GB ram and i seem to get maybe 3 hours at best running just safari or web browsing. the mbp is about 2 weeks old. battery life is HORRIBLE.
i was using FaceTime today with my brother and i was on 49% battery after about 30 - 40 mins chatting it went to down to just 2%. i really cut see any other applications running in activity monitor. maybe FaceTime eats up battery quicker but even still if i was just browsing web battery is still sh*tty. i Always have screen brightness down about two the way or have it up maximum half way. i never use keypad lights so i can't understand. it shows battery life remaining on a fully charge with low screen brightness as 5 hours but that will quickly diminish to 3 or 2 if using even on just web browsing etc 7 hours??? apple is kidding

Replace brother with friend and I swear you must be my mac-twin. I'm experiencing the exact same issue with mine.

I havent done a timed test on it but normal web browsing, throw in a few youtube video's and it honestly feels like I'm getting 1hr out of a full battery.

I've read it probably should have been (the battery) calibrated on day one. I didn't know this. I didnt even know any laptop should have a battery calibration. Should I bring it back to the store where I got it, or to Apple directly?

Nodferatu

bc dub wrote: »

Replace brother with friend and I swear you must be my mac-twin. I'm experiencing the exact same issue with mine.

I havent done a timed test on it but normal web browsing, throw in a few youtube video's and it honestly feels like I'm getting 1hr out of a full battery.

I've read it probably should have been (the battery) calibrated on day one. I didn't know this. I didnt even know any laptop should have a battery calibration. Should I bring it back to the store where I got it, or to Apple directly?

you dont need to, you can calibrate the battery yourself. how long have you got your macbook?
here's link to how you can calibrate it, http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1490

Hobbes

Nodferatu wrote: »

you dont need to, you can calibrate the battery yourself. how long have you got your macbook?
here's link to how you can calibrate it, http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1490

Wont work on later models ( see end of tech note )

OctavarIan

Something might be drawing heavily on the graphics card? The 15" and 17" will take a battery hit when the graphics card is being used over the integrated Intel chip. Not sure just how much it affects the battery life though but could be something to check out.

bc dub

cheers, mine is a 15" so perhaps that has an affect alright but I have to say irregardless of small factors such as some of the the ones mentioned above, I am getting shag all battery time. Its my first mac and although it runs like a dream this battery thing is annoying.

Can anyone recommend a tip to see what is using battery power? Similar to ctrl+alt+del on windows and reading what percentages us being used by individual programs...

ps, if you haven't guessed I'm a mac noob

Hobbes

bc dub wrote: »

Can anyone recommend a tip to see what is using battery power? Similar to ctrl+alt+del on windows and reading what percentages us being used by individual programs...

ps, if you haven't guessed I'm a mac noob

"Activity Monitor"

* don't go killing processes that are busy unless you know exactly what it is, what it is doing and if it is safe to do so.

bc dub

cheers, checked it there and about two or three applications are using 3/4/5 %.

Maybe i'll do a full timed test over the weekend on 100% battery and report back to see if its the norm...

fasty

You can check from System Profiler what GPU is in use. There are also tools that let you switch between them at will, but I can't speak for them, I keep my installs pretty vanilla.

From experience, anything that uses OpenGL directly, or indirectly via an app that uses Core Animation will kick in the more powerful GPU.

This includes apps like Facetime, iPhoto, Photobooth and Unison.

Thankfully in Lion, developers can set a property in their apps to make an app use the less powerful GPU all the time and still have some eye candy. This only works on early 2011 MBPs atm, but hopefully will work for others in the future!

GhostInTheRuins

Download gfxcardstatus. When you're not plugged in switch it to use only the intel graphics chip. A lot of programs make the MBP switch to the GPU when it's not necessary and that's what's draining your battery. Silly programs like skype or the new firefox do it for some reason.