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Please post your battery drain rate in sleep mode on new MBP

H

hari-bhari

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 4, 2007
140
0
I have found that my new MBP drains battery much faster in sleep mode than my old one. I am getting about a 1 percent drain per hour, or about 8-9% overnight. My early 2008 MBP would only drain a few percent at most overnight. This is using the same settings, wifi on, bluetooth off (although it shouldn't really make a difference). Is it possible that ddr3 ram uses more power to keep awake than ddr2? Also I noticed that when my battery dies on my new MBP, it basically goes straight to hibernate. My old MBP would be able to stay in sleep mode for at least 4-5 hours before hibernating. Anyways, please post your drain rates.

Drain Rate: 1% / hr or 8% overnight
 
hari-bhari said:
I have found that my new MBP drains battery much faster in sleep mode than my old one. I am getting about a 1 percent drain per hour, or about 8-9% overnight. My early 2008 MBP would only drain a few percent at most overnight. This is using the same settings, wifi on, bluetooth off (although it shouldn't really make a difference). Is it possible that ddr3 ram uses more power to keep awake than ddr2? Also I noticed that when my battery dies on my new MBP, it basically goes straight to hibernate. My old MBP would be able to stay in sleep mode for at least 4-5 hours before hibernating. Anyways, please post your drain rates.

Drain Rate: 1% / hr or 8% overnight
Click to expand...

if you read your manual, is says sleep mode is only to be used for short periods away from the machine. I don't think you are suppost to use it indefinately/ overnight. But anyway, DDR3 is suppose to be more energy efficient, not much of a performance gain. So I think it isn't the DDR3 that causes the battery drain.
 
Coming from an old 12" PowerBook I would never shutdown, always go into sleep mode and when i returned it would have almost the same battery life as when I left it hours previous. I keep thinking that maybe my laptop didn't go into sleep mode, because after 8 hours of sleep it seems like i've lost a lot more than 8%... which just seems crazy to me.

I don't think that for laptop users sleep mode is used by most people only for "short times of being away". Rather when you open the lid you're ready to go and when you're done, you just close the lid and move on.

Maybe I'm expecting too much, but I usually expect newer technology to be better than the old. In this case, I feel like my old PowerBook was better at not draining than my new MBP. It's always possible that a future power management firmware update can tweak this, cause right now, I'm pretty disappointed with the late-2008 MBP sleep battery drain.
 
The new MBP has a smaller capacity battery so by default the drain rate is going to be faster. Also does your new machine have more RAM than the older system? More RAM = more power consumed.
 
I have an early 2008 mbp and find the battery decreases about 1%/hr in sleep mode, and i remember reading other people had similar rates. Maybe your old mbp is just abnormally good!
 
you do have a point about the battery being smaller by about 20% but the battery is still draining about 2x as fast. i had a MB and MBP and they both hardly even drained more than 5% after an entire day of sleep. something is definitely up, im hoping a fw upgrade can fix it.
 
Yeah, my rate is also about 1% per hour. This is pretty poor compared to my 3 year old Toshiba laptop (which also has 2 GB of RAM).

I love this thing more than any laptop I've ever owned, but I have to say that the battery life is pretty atrocious.
 
1% per hour sounds about right. The previous MBPs drained at this rate also, it's not a change.
 
ah... I thought I had a defective machine as my new 2.8 4gb mbp is also chewing through the battery in sleep mode. Massively so compared to my 2 year old mbp, and every other apple notebook I've owned. As usual I turned of the automatic hibernate function using terminal and the thing has just died on me about three times now, requiring a restart. Obviously I'll have to reenable that and wait the 10 seconds every time I sleep the machine (many times a day).

Previous gen owners should take note. The new battery is a huge step backwards. What a shame as there are so many other less critical positives.

Might be interesting to see the specs of the offending machines. Post here please!
 
I've posted about the same problem previously. Somebody suggested I calibrate the battery and it might help. So I did that yesterday and I just came back to MBP after letting it sleep for 4 or 5 hours and it is down to about 96% on my iStat.

This brings up another good question though. My iStat is currently reading 96% battery but the light on my charger is green and the battery icon states that is fully charged. Hmmm. Any ideas why there is a difference in information?
 
dpett006 said:
This brings up another good question though. My iStat is currently reading 96% battery but the light on my charger is green and the battery icon states that is fully charged. Hmmm. Any ideas why there is a difference in information?
Click to expand...

The charger won't top off the battery if it is only a few percent drained. If you drain it a couple more percent then plug it in it will charge. They do this to save wear on the battery.
 
same thing here

I have noticed a rapid rate of drain on the battery as well. I woke up my computer one day to see an abnormally low amount of battery life left. I thought maybe I had used it more than I thought so I said eh whatever. It said I had 49 min left of use, I think about 20% left. I used the computer for 15 mins, then put it to sleep, and went to bed. When I went to use it the next day it was completely dead. I thought I might have a faulty battery, so it's interesting that other users have the same experience. I have been using either a macbook pro or powerbook for the past 6 years, numerous models, and never had this sort of drain on a battery before.
 
My MBP (specs in sig) also drains extraordinarily quickly.

Left it at 67% last night and woke up with 54%.

So about 1.6% per hour over an 8 hour period.

I left it this morning around 9am with 50%, came back at 5:30pm and it had 24%.

That's about 3% per hour over the 8.5 hours I was away from it.

My PowerBook G4 never lost more than 1-3% overnight.


Someone please tell me my math is wrong.
 
Hmm I'm guessing about 1%/hour for me though I swear once it drained only about 4% overnight. My Sony lost 8% overnight while *off*. I think the MBP is doing well..
 
This is a *major* problem for me... I've been getting closer to 2%/hour drain... I unplugged my new 2008 2.4GHz Macbook pro at noon today, and when I opened it now (at roughly 8PM), the battery was at 84%.

Coming from my old Macbook Pro, where its battery would only drain at most 3%-4% in the same time period. (My old machine was a 2006 2.33GHz C2D (Merom)... Both machines are 15"ers.

Also, more often than not, when I put my machine to sleep with a low battery it will wake up *completely* dead. That means when I plug it in it needs to restore memory from its safesleep file on the HDD, which takes a while since I have 4GB of memory. This *never* happened.
 
ohhh i got you all beat. going from work to home today with my 2.8ghz mbp in sleep mode, it went from 95% to 86%. in less than an hour.
 
so basically its more than triple the drain rate of the previous gen MBP :-/ I wonder what's causing this, maybe it warrants an email to sjobs? Someone got a reply a while back for the touchpad issue.

note: i just sent him a polite email asking whether this is known and will be addressed, can't hurt...
 
Why do I lose soooo much battery life when my late 2008 mbp is in sleep?!

I have the low end late 2008 macbook pro, and I have consistently noticed that I lose a lot of battery life when I put the machine in sleep--close the lid.

Why does this happen?

I remember one night, I had it fully charged, and I went to sleep, and I woke up 8 hours later, and I had lost 20% or more of battery life?!?!?!?!?!

Is is not going into "sleep" when I close the lid?

I have the wifi enabled, but I have the bluetooth disabled. I genertally have mail, firefox 3 with 5-ish tabs, ichat, and sometimes itunes open. I also sometimes have word or some other office app open. i DO NOT have the 9600gt enabled. I only have the 9400m enabled.

Why does this happen?

IS there anything I am doing wrong?
 
Same has happend for me too.

This is really annoying since my macbook from spring 2008, i have never noticed this, and it has been in sleep for a week or more sometimes.
 
From Finder 'Go:Go to Folder' or shift-cmd-G.
Type '/var', click 'Go'
From the folder 'vm' trash the file 'sleepimage'
Restart and see if things improve.
 
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