Are You Experiencing Battery Problems In OS X Lion?

[eternalife]

I recall reading somewhere that for those who have parallels installed would have to do an update for it to work properly in Lion. Even if you do not launch it it automatically runs in the background causing massive drain in battery and performance...might want to check it out ya.

Even under SL Parallels ate my battery faster than a melting ice cube. I only have one application I that I use frequently that has to run under Parallels. I would dump that software if I could.

 

[DropKick]

Even under SL Parallels ate my battery faster than a melting ice cube. I only have one application I that I use frequently that has to run under Parallels. I would dump that software if I could.

ever try virtualbox? It's free, worth a shot.

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

 

[singhjeet29]

I'm currently at 42%, lightly web browsing and on Adium, with Mail and iTunes (not playing) also open. And my battery is telling me I'm only getting another 1.5 hours. Which is absolutely absurd, I used to get around ~3 at this point, with this type of activity on Snow Leopard.

 

[DropKick]

well I can confirm the SMC reset did something, battery life is 10x better.... I've only dropped 20% in 2 hours, where previously that would be near the point where I'd have to plug it in.

 

[TCV1]

Tried this and no luck, does the comp need to be fully charged before hand? or does it work at any level of battery life? Also it might be an idea to lets people know you need to have your magsafe power adapter plugged in before you do it.

Hi Guys,

may be you can tried this.

http://blog.howardtang.com/2011/07/a-fixed-for-mac-os-x-lion-reduces-battery-life/

It fixed my problem.

SL = 6hrs
LN = 3hrs

after fix

LN = 6 hrs again.

 

[YourHerojb]

If you're experiencing problems, you should reset your battery information.
The new OS seems to have the battery a bit confused.

If you shut down, then hold control+Option+Shift and the power button for over 10 seconds it should fix this.
Make sure it's connected to power when you do this.

 

[eeyoredragon]

Using my NAS (afp) uses considerably more CPU in Lion that it did in Snow Leopard.

So, yeah, my battery life has gone down significantly.

 

[Alveezy]

If you're experiencing problems, you should reset your battery information.
The new OS seems to have the battery a bit confused.

If you shut down, then hold control+Option+Shift and the power button for over 10 seconds it should fix this.
Make sure it's connected to power when you do this.

does this reset your cycle counts info to "0"?

 

[adder7712]

Under light-moderate use at 3:35 hours.

Quite normal, I suppose. Probably I did reset the SMC a few days back.

 

[-tWv-]

If you look at my thread here, I'm pretty sure the decrease in battery life is because of the increased CPU usage while scrolling in all applications. It must be the new animations added with Lion that are taxing the CPU, hopefully a fix is released soon..

 

[keithhooper]

Battery

Battery life has dropped to less than half on a MacBook Air. At most I can get maybe 3 hours if I am lucky. It used to be in the 7 range.

 

[bobnlyne]

If you're experiencing problems, you should reset your battery information.
The new OS seems to have the battery a bit confused.

If you shut down, then hold control+Option+Shift and the power button for over 10 seconds it should fix this.
Make sure it's connected to power when you do this.

Well, I'm watching it, and so far this is very promising. I will continue to monitor, and should know for certain by the end of the day, or maybe in a couple days (yeah I'm that skeptical).

I tried the SMC reset earlier but the Apple site didn't specify how long to hold down the key combination. When I found this post I tried it again.

By the way, my battery was only at 90% when I did the reset.

More later.

 

[GuitarG20]

i just did the SMC reset (i think). Is there any way the computer will tell you that it reset?

More to follow later.

 

[LowMach]

i just did the SMC reset (i think). Is there any way the computer will tell you that it reset?

More to follow later.

you should see the magsafe charge light blink green if i remember correctly

 

[hkl00k]

Someone found the real cause

http://www.shaasthra.com/2011/08/revealed-mac-os-x-lion-battery-drain.html

 

[GuitarG20]

Someone found the real cause

http://www.shaasthra.com/2011/08/revealed-mac-os-x-lion-battery-drain.html

This isn't my problem. I always use GFXcardstatus to keep myself on the integrated graphics.

About to pull off the power brick, we'll see if the reset worked. And yes, the magsafe light did blink, so hopefully it will work.

(don't know how to quote more than one in one post, so only one quote it is)

 

[anyjah]

Skype

Having Skype running kicks in the dedicated card for me. It's a big difference, not the one everyones really looking for, but something I noticed. I'm at 78% w/ 3:59 remaining w/o Skype and 2:20 w/ Skype running.

MacBook Pro 6,1

 

[harrisondavies]

I have noticed a drop...but also there does seem to be an issue where it stops charging momentarily and then start randomly.

 

[GuitarG20]

battery lasted about 7 hours this time... SMC reset kinda did it

 

[anyjah]

Another program

1Password (the full program not the browser plugin) also triggers a switch to the NVIDIA graphics card. I believe that's weird since it doesn't do anything that would be intensive. So maybe there was a loss in logic of when the graphics card should be triggered?

 

[GuitarG20]

lots of programs trigger the switch, including chrome, netNewsWire, Twitter, skype...

Just use gfxCardStatus to control what uses the discrete card and what stays on the integrated... it'll tell you what is turning on the graphics card too.

 

[d0ster]

I did a clean install on my MBP 13' 2011 and at first I did experience battery depreciation but after a SMC reset and calibration of the battery, all is good.

I specifically did a clean install because of the battery issue; I heard some say it helps for whatever reason and it seems to work for me.

 

[baspowe]

Was on Snow Leopard on Macbook Pro 13 2010. Recently upgraded to Lion, my battery life also deteriorated greatly. Just did a SMC reset followed by a NVRAM reset. Fixed things for me!

SMC reset: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
PRAM/NVRAM reset: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

 

[NorthDakota91]

I have been experiencing battery issues on my MBP since the installation of Lion however, I think I have it narrowed down as to what is causing the problem.

It does not seem to matter what I am doing, the battery life is always about what it used to be, until I launch Safari.

It seems that the scrolling both up and down and forwards and backwards is caning the battery. If you look at Activity Monitor, the CPU and memory use increases significantly when scrolling.

For example, my battery at the moment says that it has 7hrs 1min whilst I am typing this post.

If I start scrolling backwards and forwards or up and down web pages, within minutes it is reporting back that I have just over 4hrs remaining.

Could anyone else report back if they are having the same issues?

Thanks in advance

Jason

Yes I can confirm this behaviour! Not only with Safari, but it seems that ANY animated scrolling truncates the battery life (switching between fullscreen apps, scrolling in Mail and Safari, ...). I don't know how reliable is the lion's battery monitor (the one on the menubar) but when I do not scroll, I get 7-8 hrs, but when I scroll I get only 3-4 hrs.

Sending a bug report to Apple

BTW, I have a white Macbook 7.1 (the last one) with Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 4 GB of Ram and a Momentus XT H-HDD.

 

[GuitarG20]

I just added the PRAM reset to the SMC reset- I'll see if this improves battery life any more.