How much time on MacBook Pro unplugged

D

Durbrow

Registered
I am getting about 2 hours on my MacBook Pro using Airport running on the battery with the Conservation option set in Energy Savings. Is this normal? How much time are you getting?

P.S. Can we do a poll?
 
I just purchased a new battery last night because of super-fast drain (probably 2 years old, and I do run a lot of apps at one time). Charged it 100% overnight, and began using it at 5:30a.m. It is now 6:48a.m. and the charge says 62%. This seems ridiculously fast.

Right now, I am running Airport, and have Firefox, Entourage, and Acrobat open.
 
To save power immediately when (this is good for ANY portable) is to turn down the brightness and speaker when on the battery. You will see almost a hours worth more when doing this. Also when on battery go to System Preferences->Energy Saver and use the pull down to select Settings for Battery and turn down the sleep times and put a check mark in "Put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible".

Smart energy management will make any battery last longer.
 
You can check on the condition of your battery, by opening your System Profiler/Power tab. The battery in a MacBook Pro (for a good, new battery) should show more than 5000 maH next to Total Charge Available. If the figure is less than 3000, then that's why you get 2 hours or less of battery use. The other relevant number is Total Charge Cycles. If that goes over 300, then your battery will deteriorate fairly quickly. You may also see the description next to Battery Condition something other than Good. Fair, or Poor will indicate the demise of your battery, and you would need to replace it.
 
kate_b said:
Charged it 100% overnight, and began using it at 5:30a.m. It is now 6:48a.m. and the charge says 62%. This seems ridiculously fast.

Right now, I am running Airport, and have Firefox, Entourage, and Acrobat open.
Click to expand...

That sounds about right, as it means you'll get about 3 hours 30 minutes use on a single charge. Don't believe Apple's stupid quote of 5 hours since that's never with typical use.

If you want to maximise your battery life, drop the screen brightness to at least half, reduce the volume of your speakers (or mute them if you do not need sound), turn off bluetooth and set your power profile to "Energy Saver".

On my Macbook, I never ever got the stated "maximum" and doing the steps above brought me as close as I could possibly get.
 
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