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macbook: more RAM = less battery life ???

K

Kuchiki

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 27, 2007
6
0
I upgraded from factory 1 gig ram to 2 gig of mushkin ram, and it seems like the battery life has gotten worse, can anyone tell me why? I thought battery life was supposed to be better after upgrading the ram, since it would mean less accessing of the hdd.

I've tried resetting the PMU, and even recalibrating the battery itself. It's trickling out a lot of battery power while in sleep mode. (sleep mode for an hour = 3% battery loss) I don't ever recall it being bad before this upgrade.

I'm not sure if it's due to Leopard either, as I've been experiencing the lack of automatic sleep at 8% battery life, which is a bug from what I've read on the apple forums.

Is the ram I got no good? or is it a leopard issue? Or...??


Any input is appreciated. :)
 
That's interesting. What sort of MacBook do you have?

Mine's a Santa Rosa one (November 2007) 2.2GHz upped to 4GB of RAM from OWC. If I let it sleep, battery life drops approx 5%-6% every 10 or so hours.

I expect the increased battery drain is normal. Since during sleep, the RAM is still powered on. More RAM, more energy needed to power them.

Anyone out there care to post their MacBook's battery drain during sleep?
 
Laptop battery life will decrease with more RAM as obviously the extra RAM needs extra power. Your hard-drive is likely spinning constantly when you are using your laptop so that drain is probably constant regardless of the amount of RAM.
 
mckyvlle said:
That's interesting. What sort of MacBook do you have?

Mine's a Santa Rosa one (November 2007) 2.2GHz upped to 4GB of RAM from OWC. If I let it sleep, battery life drops approx 5%-6% every 10 or so hours.

I expect the increased battery drain is normal. Since during sleep, the RAM is still powered on. More RAM, more energy needed to power them.

Anyone out there care to post their MacBook's battery drain during sleep?
Click to expand...

I'm not exactly sure which core I'm running but it's a 2.0 duo core, I bought it around Sept of 2007, so I'm thinking it's the core before Santa Rosa?

I was thinking about going back to the old factory RAM and seeing "what's up", but is 3% while in sleep for an hour excessive battery drain? I knew extra ram would take extra power, but this much power? Ehh...
 
Kuchiki said:
I'm not exactly sure which core I'm running but it's a 2.0 duo core, I bought it around Sept of 2007, so I'm thinking it's the core before Santa Rosa?

I was thinking about going back to the old factory RAM and seeing "what's up", but is 3% while in sleep for an hour excessive battery drain? I knew extra ram would take extra power, but this much power? Ehh...
Click to expand...

I think that's normal... seems to be around what I get on my MBP with 4GB.
 
Kuchiki said:
I'm not exactly sure which core I'm running but it's a 2.0 duo core, I bought it around Sept of 2007, so I'm thinking it's the core before Santa Rosa?

I was thinking about going back to the old factory RAM and seeing "what's up", but is 3% while in sleep for an hour excessive battery drain? I knew extra ram would take extra power, but this much power? Ehh...
Click to expand...

Yup, yours would be a pre-Santa Rosa MacBook. Those only came out in November, after Leopard's launch.

There's more to just RAM that affects battery drain, including ambient temperature and battery condition. 3% in an hour doesn't sound that bad. What happens if you let it sleep longer?
 
Sorry for the delayed responses, but I ended up resetting all the power unit management stuff, and my battery life went from 3 back to 5 hours again. So all is well. :)
 
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