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15" Core i7 Macbook Pro, only 4 hours battery life and ~10 min Startup?

S

spierce7

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 26, 2010
19
0
I've had my 15" Core i7 MBP for about a week now. I upgraded from my 2.8 15", and while the machine is more powerful I've noticed some odd changes that I'm not sure what to make of.

1. The battery life is about 4 hours. I've upgraded the hard drive to 7200 RPM, and to 8GB of memory. I'm not doing more than surfing the web and it's estimating the battery life at 4 hours (its been doing this consistently). I'm not doing anything more than I would do on my old 2.8 GHz, but the battery life is much much worse. I thought it was supposed to be better, and with the upgrades I was expecting about the same. Something is wrong here I think. EDIT: This is done on 1/2 screen brightness.

2. The second thing is my computer has been taking 5 to 10 minutes to startup. A bar will appear during the install. I originally thought it was possibly an update installing or something, but it appears not since it happens almost every time I start up OSX (ALMOST every time, doesn't happen every single time). I've taken a picture and have posted it below.

20100503131704.jpg


Any thoughts are welcome, and I hope some light can be shed on what's going on with my mac here. Thanks!
 
This may seem silly but I've seen a similar problem when the harddrive wasn't fully supported or had some existing issue out of the box. Possibly got a bad HDD from where you got it from.

Two things: drive is having trouble reading information from disk leading to horrible startup times, and it's constantly running at maximum speed which will CERTAINLY lower battery life.

Keep in mind most 5400rpm hard drives actually spin down to something like 2400rpm when not in use, 7200rpm will do the same, but it consumes more power at peak speed. This could also stack with the HDD being a less power efficient model.


But like A42 said, I'd try a fresh install, then try returning the harddrive if that doesn't work.
 
strange, but I think I may be having some battery problems too. I just got my macbook 15" i7 two days ago and today while surfing the web I started noticing the battery life change dramatically. I went from 8hrs to 4hrs then back up to 6 hrs in a matter of minuets, and now it's at 7:42hr barely using the battery and as I just typed that it jumped down to 5:07hr.

So yes, definitely some strange battery issues. Going to take it to the apple store tonight. I'll post what they tell me when I get back.

4:42hr.
 
lilmacbird said:
strange, but I think I may be having some battery problems too. I just got my macbook 15" i7 two days ago and today while surfing the web I started noticing the battery life change dramatically. I went from 8hrs to 4hrs then back up to 6 hrs in a matter of minuets, and now it's at 7:42hr barely using the battery and as I just typed that it jumped down to 5:07hr.

So yes, definitely some strange battery issues. Going to take it to the apple store tonight. I'll post what they tell me when I get back.

4:42hr.
Click to expand...

Install gfxcardStatus:http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus/

It's likely that you'll see that once the nvidia 330gt is running thats when your battery life drops. It is triggered at some point by certain websites or actions and then it won't drop back to integrated graphics and thats when the battery life will show a big drop.
 
Did you clone the drive from the 2.8? I have seen a lot of people have problems that way. You have want to do an Archive Install and see if that improves anything.
 
the boot loader bar thing that you see sometimes when you boot happened to me on my late-2009 iMac and when i held option while starting to choose a boot disc, instead of Mac OS it had EFI Boot.....to me that says that it cant find Mac OS or it cant boot it properly so i did a clean install and it completely fixed it

also with your battery life, everything depends on how intensive you are forcing your computer to work. For example, reading forums is considered light usage, but watching videos in flash on the web is heavy usage.....flash has been known to use up to 65% of the CPU on mac (which will be fixed in the coming months)

just try to monitor what you are doing on your computer at any given time :)

and 10-minutes of running the hard drive at full speed to try and boot would use a considerable amount of battery life
 
I've got a 2010 i7 15" with a 7200rpm drive as well. While I've yet to see a 10 hour battery charge, I am routinely getting 7.5 hours out of mine just using mail, preview, Safari and sporadic WiFi access. Screen brightness is set to 3/4 of max and hard drive access is minimal. I got just under 7 hours last week once while watching both parts 2 and 3 of the extended cut version of LOTR and some light surfing.

As for boot time, I think I've only rebooted once or twice since I unboxed the thing last month, but 3 mins or so is what I recall. I hardly overdo a reboot of my MBP unless an update forces one.

Not sure what is going on with yours.
 
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