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battery charge on my new 11" Air...

Slugo

Slugo

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 2, 2011
10
0
PA
lucky to get 2 hours plus. Just bought the computer about a month ago at our local Apple Store in Lancaster, PA. Love it, but the battery is rated for 5 hours. That's a laugher! Anyway, I'm running Lion and I hear it's a battery hog.

Any help or words of wisdom is appreciated... :confused:
 
Slugo said:
lucky to get 2 hours plus. Just bought the computer about a month ago at our local Apple Store in Lancaster, PA. Love it, but the battery is rated for 5 hours. That's a laugher! Anyway, I'm running Lion and I hear it's a battery hog.

Any help or words of wisdom is appreciated... :confused:
Click to expand...

What are you doing for those 2 hours?
 
______________________________________________________
Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example
Acitivty_Monitor.png

Further reading:
______________________________________________________​

______________________________________________________
This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:
Apple Notebook Battery FAQ by GGJstudios
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I'm just doing some misc. net surfing. No downloads, picture files or lots of streaming video. I have an iPad for watching that stuff. Actually, just building up my bookmarks with what I like. That's it in a nutshell...
 
Slugo said:
I'm just doing some misc. net surfing. No downloads, picture files or lots of streaming video. I have an iPad for watching that stuff. Actually, just building up my bookmarks with what I like. That's it in a nutshell...
Click to expand...

Have you read that Battery FAQ yet? Have you looked at Activity Monitor yet?
 
What is your brightness setting? 5 hours is an overstatement, but you should easily get 3.5+ hours based on what you describe. I was on a 4 hour flight recently and used up about 2/3 of the battery in about 2.5 hours of usage, including accessing the on-board Wi-Fi. I normally leave brightness at 50% and let the ambient light sensor do its thing.
 
This has come up before, but new MBA's out of the box will do a complete index of the drive. Because the drive is so fast, they can work really hard at it and thus burn a lot of CPU cycles for the first few days.

It'll probably settle down just fine. I was getting 4 hours even under heavy use (VMWare) on my 2011 11" Air, while at the same time surfing the web etc.

Edit: Oh sorry I see it's a month old now. It should really have settled down then. Make sure you check out the battery health with Coconutbattery. Maybe it's not right.
 
Thanks again for all your help...

I'll check on the battery health. I'm still using the computer on the factory settings. Didn't change a thing. I'm on my iPad right now and recharging the Air. I'll report back, and thank you all... Mike
 
Slugo said:
I'm just doing some misc. net surfing. No downloads, picture files or lots of streaming video. I have an iPad for watching that stuff. Actually, just building up my bookmarks with what I like. That's it in a nutshell...
Click to expand...

Did you install flash? 2 hours is low for just net surfing. You should be close to the advertised 5 if that really is all your are doing.
 
streaming video is whats killing your battery life. 5 hours+ is true when you lightly web browse and type on word
 
I just installed 'Click to Flash'. Hopefully, it will help... :eek:
 
I think 7 hours is just what they say, you can't actually expect that long, I'd say 4 hours is a safe bet, though 5 and 6 hours do happen.
 
kulimer said:
I think 7 hours is just what they say, you can't actually expect that long, I'd say 4 hours is a safe bet, though 5 and 6 hours do happen.
Click to expand...

Apple estimates 5 hours of usable time. I'm now running i off of direct AC current during the day and disconnecting at night. I will use the battery every third day and then deplete it per Apple instructions. I don't need to be running wireless all the time. We'll see how it works out...
 
I get about 6 hours on my MBA 11.6" with light usage which is consistent with anandtechs testing. Using flash reduces battery times by about 2 hours.
 
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