I used my 13.3/1.86/4GB MBA to watch football today and was pretty surprised with the poor battery results. Would this seem normal?
Took off charger at 11:45AM CST, battery 100%
Apps open - Mail, Chrome, Parallels with Win XP running, no XP apps open
11:45-12:00pm - Simple browsing, no flash running (I use FlashBlock)
12:00pm - I start up one window for NFL Sunday Ticket Online, Flash fullscreen video and one window for my Yahoo Fantasy Sports which also uses Flash. For the bulk of the time the NFL game is on fullscreen video with my Fantasy app running in the background
1:15pm - I notice my battery is down to 48% with approx 1 hr 10 min remaining. I check my screen brightness and it is at 100% (not sure why), I reduce brightness to 50%
1:15 - I use the computer same as at 12:00pm but now at 50% brightness
2:20 - My computer goes into hibernation (there was a low battery warning about 5-10 mins earlier.
So I essentially got 2 1/2 hours of usage with the bulk being heavy usage with flash. For the bulk of the time the computer was using 50-60% of the processor and the exhaust was about 3400rpm (the fan was audible but not loud). Does this usage time seem normal for what I did? I would have expected at least to get 4-5 hours with a 13.3 using flash. Also I was surprised that the battery life didn't improve at all after dropping screen brightness from 100% to 50%.
Thoughts?
Took off charger at 11:45AM CST, battery 100%
Apps open - Mail, Chrome, Parallels with Win XP running, no XP apps open
11:45-12:00pm - Simple browsing, no flash running (I use FlashBlock)
12:00pm - I start up one window for NFL Sunday Ticket Online, Flash fullscreen video and one window for my Yahoo Fantasy Sports which also uses Flash. For the bulk of the time the NFL game is on fullscreen video with my Fantasy app running in the background
1:15pm - I notice my battery is down to 48% with approx 1 hr 10 min remaining. I check my screen brightness and it is at 100% (not sure why), I reduce brightness to 50%
1:15 - I use the computer same as at 12:00pm but now at 50% brightness
2:20 - My computer goes into hibernation (there was a low battery warning about 5-10 mins earlier.
So I essentially got 2 1/2 hours of usage with the bulk being heavy usage with flash. For the bulk of the time the computer was using 50-60% of the processor and the exhaust was about 3400rpm (the fan was audible but not loud). Does this usage time seem normal for what I did? I would have expected at least to get 4-5 hours with a 13.3 using flash. Also I was surprised that the battery life didn't improve at all after dropping screen brightness from 100% to 50%.
Thoughts?
