2 hour battery life???

[rmkonrath]

To start with I used the search funtion and haven't been able to find anything.

I just recently bought a MBP 15" top of the line. I remember from all my readings that the battery should last 6 - 8 hours. I'm not running any "intensive" programs. basically just chrome, vmware, and skype occasionally.

My battery meter, fully charged, only gives me roughly 2 hours of battery life. Here are my settings...screen brightness - half, backlight - on, lowest setting, display sleep - 5 minutes, computer sleep - 20 min.

Is this normal? I really haven't adjusted any other preferences and followed the recommended battery set up the first day I got my computer.

Thanks.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

VMWare Fusion is CPU intensive.

Take a look at Activity Monitor (Show All Processes and sort by CPU) to see, what might use too much CPU.

 

[snaky69]

To start with I used the search funtion and haven't been able to find anything.

I just recently bought a MBP 15" top of the line. I remember from all my readings that the battery should last 6 - 8 hours. I'm not running any "intensive" programs. basically just chrome, vmware, and skype occasionally.

My battery meter, fully charged, only gives me roughly 2 hours of battery life. Here are my settings...screen brightness - half, backlight - on, lowest setting, display sleep - 5 minutes, computer sleep - 20 min.

Is this normal? I really haven't adjusted any other preferences and followed the recommended battery set up the first day I got my computer.

Thanks.

VMware uses a lot of resources, so you're going to see a big hit on the battery life. You're asking your computer to run 2 operating systems at once, so even at idle, it'll be using twice the power.(Quick mental calculations tell me that if you have 8 hour battery life on idle, you're down to 4-6 with vmware).

Skype relies on video codecs to render webcam video, etc, also resource intensive, also a big hit on battery life. (You do the math).

6-8 hours is do-able, with display brightness reduced to half, no time machine, no bluetooth, wi-fi, browsing webpages with no flash content and writing a word document(I pretty much described how apple gets their battery life claims).

 

[Stvwndr219]

VMware uses a lot of resources, so you're going to see a big hit on the battery life. You're asking your computer to run 2 operating systems at once, so even at idle, it'll be using twice the power.(Quick mental calculations tell me that if you have 8 hour battery life on idle, you're down to 4-6 with vmware).

Skype relies on video codecs to render webcam video, etc, also resource intensive, also a big hit on battery life. (You do the math).

6-8 hours is do-able, with display brightness reduced to half, no time machine, no bluetooth, wi-fi, browsing webpages with no flash content and writing a word document(I pretty much described how apple gets their battery life claims).

This:

On my early 2008 mbp, I usually get 3, maybe 4 if i'm not browsing any flash sites but as soon as flash pops up or I use google voice, the cpu usage spikes, computer gets warmer, battery life drops.

 

[rmkonrath]

VMWare Fusion is CPU intensive.

Take a look at Activity Monitor (Show All Processes and sort by CPU) to see, what might use too much CPU.

Using activity monitor I'm at around 70% idle, 288 threads, 64 processes.

Skype is barely used. bluetooth is off.

Here's another question...using istat nano i looked at the processes and iavd is at 97%. this is iantivirus i believe. Is there a better one? or is this normal?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Using activity monitor I'm at around 70% idle, 288 threads, 64 processes.

Skype is barely used. bluetooth is off.

Here's another question...using istat nano i looked at the processes and iavd is at 97%. this is iantivirus i believe. Is there a better one? or is this normal?

There is no need for AV software on Mac OS X, as they only scan for Windows viruses, which can't harm Mac OS X. There is some "Malware Info" that a poster put together, maybe you can find it via the forum search or that mroogle thing no one talks about.

 

[Saturdays]

Webpages with Flash content will bring your battery life down a lot too.

 

[Shockre]

dont use chrome, use safari. chrome uses much more power, dunno why. try it yourself if you dont belive me. and vmware uses alot of power. i get around 3.5h with safari,itunes,tweetie,mail and vmware (win 7 pro) with a few basic programming apps in it on my 13" 2010 mbp. and i have a momenetus xt hdd which uses more power than stock hdd. with chrome instead safari and all that programs i was getting about 2.5hrs.

 

[deeesea]

I was just gonna say "you're probably running windows then " and i noticed that you were using VMware. There's your culprit, VMware sucks battery life.

 

[tekksan]

You could Quit one app at a time, wait a minute or so and then check your battery life. repeat until you find out what is sucking up the battery.

Fwiw I use chrome with a flash blocker installed. Good to block all those flash ads as well as massively cut down CPU. Btw, adobe just released a new beta of flash that is supposed to be better on batteries-10.2

 

[Mabyboi]

I normally get about 8-10 hours on mine due to my SSD, but i noticed when i run Parallel's it sucks the battery down to about 3... running the second OS is whats killing you..

 

[noodlemanc]

dont use chrome, use safari. chrome uses much more power, dunno why. try it yourself if you dont belive me. and vmware uses alot of power. i get around 3.5h with safari,itunes,tweetie,mail and vmware (win 7 pro) with a few basic programming apps in it on my 13" 2010 mbp. and i have a momenetus xt hdd which uses more power than stock hdd. with chrome instead safari and all that programs i was getting about 2.5hrs.

No, its much more snappy than Safari on my 13" MBP.

 

[gwsat]

No, its much more snappy than Safari on my 13" MBP.

I, too, shifted to Chrome from Safari because of how much faster Chrome was. With one important caveat, Chrome, which I have been using for 18 months is not a resource hog. The caveat is that once in awhile Chrome develops a glitch that causes a kernel panic, which causes it to suck up massive amounts of processing power. Fortunately, this has happened to me only a couple of times. It is easily solved, too. Simply close all open tabs and then exit Chrome. That does it. When you reload Chrome it will once again be well behaved. For example, iStat is reporting that Chrome is currently using only about 1% processing power.

I run Windows 7 and a couple of Windows apps in VMware Fusion's Unity mode all the time. Even the battery life on my 13 inch MBA, which should be shorter than that of any of the current generation MBPs is at least 5 hours if I am doing stuff like email, Web surfing, and document preparation. If I run a steady diet of Flash videos, though, I feel lucky to get 3 hours from a charge. In short, battery life is heavily influenced by the apps you are running.