Achiving better MacBook Pro battery

[InsightsIE]

Hello so I was wondering the best way to achive battery life on the go on a MacBook Pro 4,1 model. I....

1, Lower the brightness to 50%
2, Turn off blue tooth
3, Depending where Airport is off or on.

I was wondering if theres a way to really under clock the graphics or even use onboard vga or something or find another way. With that I get 3Hours. For a Mac with less than 10 cycles wheres the 4.5 - 5 Hour battery?

 

[miles01110]

The less you use your computer while it's on battery, the more life you'll get out of it. Turn brightness down further, don't run any applications, and just stare at the desktop.

 

[Zorginator]

Hello so I was wondering the best way to achive battery life on the go on a MacBook Pro 4,1 model. I....

1, Lower the brightness to 50%
2, Turn off blue tooth
3, Depending where Airport is off or on.

I was wondering if theres a way to really under clock the graphics or even use onboard vga or something or find another way. With that I get 3Hours. For a Mac with less than 10 cycles wheres the 4.5 - 5 Hour battery?

Lower brightness further and turn off keyboard backlighting. I pretty sure you can underclock the CPU somehow, not sure about the GPU.

 

[kryptonianjorel]

Turn off the backlit keys

 

[RKpro]

Quit unnecessary applications.
Low screen brightness.
Turn keyboard lights off, bluetooth off.
Take out disk from optical drive.
Mute the sound.

Eject and unplug any unused drives, ejecting ntfs partitions (like the bootcamp partition) will help if you have ntfs-3g installed, because I noticed it uses a few % of the cpu even when idle.

Activate AdBlock Plus in Firefox. It makes a big difference if you're browsing on your battery. Ads (flash ads in particular) take up a lot of bandwidth and cpu cycles.

When I'm writing a paper for school, I have Firefox and Pages open, and I can easily get 5.5hours with above settings. (I have the 5 hour battery)

And according to some people, SSDs consume less energy than HDDs. I don't think it will make a big difference though.

If you're really anal about max possible battery life, you can go about disabling unused services in the OS like spotlight, dashboard, and animation effects like dock magnification... etc. , but I don't think it's worth it.