PB 15" Power Consumption

S

stephentj

Registered
I was happy as a pig in **** when I found my new PB15 )1.33 with 1GB ram on 10.3.7) achieved a much better battery life than my 18 month old PB 12 867. Surprised but happy!

2 days ago I notice the battery was sucking out in about 1/2 the normal time and the fan was on almost continuously. The base of the machine was also very hot.

I encountered a problem syncing my Palm T5 via BT and decided to reboot the machine. When restarted the PB15 was back to it's old form, running cool and delivering excellent battery life - around 4 hours.

Have checked the Apple battery fault (https://depot.info.apple.com/batteryexchange/index.html) and my battery is not one of the affected LG ones.

Any ideas?
 
That's probably because a program crashed, and was using up all available CPU time. This explains the high temperatures, constant fan, and low battery life. Rebooting the computer solved it and I'm guessing it's your bluetooth sync program that crashed the first time around that caused the problems in the first place.
 
Thanks Viro

I'll check this if it happens again. The BT sync crash prompted me to reboot but the high battery use had been occurring for sometime before I tried to sync.

Still, it could be another crashed program that caused the problem. I was surfing the web using Safari and also running MS Entourage at the time. I can't recall if there were other programs running but I think not.

Is there a utility which can identify what is running and using processor resources?
 
Activity Monitor.

You could also try restting the PMU, maybe zapping pram. And check out Apple on how to recalibrate your battery.
 
Yup. There it is in the Utilities. Thanks for the tip.

Will do the other stuff if the problem reoccurs. Right now everything is just ticketty boo.
 
there is a handy program called menu meters which lets me keep track of how hard my processor is working. whenever i am using a program that eats up processing power (as seen in the menu), the powerbook gets a bit toasty and the fans turn on. this utility may help you keep an eye on what makes your laptop work so hard, if it happens again.
 
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