Battery empties completely on my MBP

[yoak]

Today I had 65% left of my battery.
I closed my MBP and made dinner, a few hours later I opened it and it was "dead" as in totaly out of battery.

I had to plug it in and start it "from scratch".
This never happened on my iBook, I could leave it in sleep mode overnight and I had hardly any battery loss at all.

If it emptied, it would go into deep sleep or what ever it´s called.
Then it was just to re-plug it and wake it up.

Is it something wrong with my MBP or is it just different from the iBook?

 

[alphaod]

You probably had a program that prevented your computer from sleeping so it's just ran itself out.

 

[nak0604]

The sims 2 freezes

Its off topic but my sims 2 game freezes when it starts up and i have it at the lowest graphics setting and it still freezes up!

 

[alphaod]

Its off topic but my sims 2 game freezes when it starts up and i have it at the lowest graphics setting and it still freezes up!

If it's off topic, then create your own thread.

 

[DJ567]

Its off topic but my sims 2 game freezes when it starts up and i have it at the lowest graphics setting and it still freezes up!

that seems a little more than off topic


also i second the idea that there was a program preventing sleep, although i always thought once it got really low it forced sleep (like when u are calibrating and have to wait however many hours for it to completely run dry while asleep)

 

[yoak]

that seems a little more than off topic


also i second the idea that there was a program preventing sleep, although i always thought once it got really low it forced sleep (like when u are calibrating and have to wait however many hours for it to completely run dry while asleep)

Exactly.

I´m getting worried here. I was just surfing the web of battery and the indicator said I had 19% left, it was showing red.
(No warning of running on reserve power or what ever my ibook used to tell me) when it suddenly just turned off!

I couldn´t re start it before I had plugged it in again.
When it was up and running it showed 18% battery left.

EDIT: I was only running Safari, Skype and I guess Quicksilver

 

[oneEG6]

Check your cycle count on the battery and the max capacity. Click on the apple logo, upper left corner> about this mac> more info.

Then click on "power" on the left column. You should be able to see your battery's cycle count and full charge capacity. If the cycle count is over or near 300, you probably need a new battery.

 

[yoak]

Check your cycle count on the battery and the max capacity. Click on the apple logo, upper left corner> about this mac> more info.

Then click on "power" on the left column. You should be able to see your battery's cycle count and full charge capacity. If the cycle count is over or near 300, you probably need a new battery.

Thanks, but my Mac is just a couple of months old.
I did check though and it said 30 cycles and good condition.

Could the battery be faulty or is this software related?

 

[cubedweller]

My MBP has lots of wierd sleep issues; it will refuse to sleep on it's own (e.g. via a timer) and it will occasionally wake up from sleep while in clam-shell mode. I've woken up to many, many dead batteries. I've had my MBP in for repair in the past and they were unable to resolve the problem. I resent it in last week for a second attempt. I have a SR MBP (late 2007).

From what I've been told by the many geniuses who have attempted to diagnose my problem, sleep issues (when related to hardware) are extremely hard to track down. The first time I had it in for repair they replaced the MLB (main logic board) and this time, they claim to be replacing the "Sleep Switch." We'll see what happens now.

 

[yoak]

Thanks Cubedweller.
So I feared.

I came home to find my MBP off again. When I restared it it said it had 30% battery left. I´m in the process of calibrating it though. I´m charging it back up to full and then I´ll empty it for a second time

 

[DJ567]

My MBP has lots of wierd sleep issues; it will refuse to sleep on it's own (e.g. via a timer) and it will occasionally wake up from sleep while in clam-shell mode. I've woken up to many, many dead batteries. I've had my MBP in for repair in the past and they were unable to resolve the problem. I resent it in last week for a second attempt. I have a SR MBP (late 2007).

From what I've been told by the many geniuses who have attempted to diagnose my problem, sleep issues (when related to hardware) are extremely hard to track down. The first time I had it in for repair they replaced the MLB (main logic board) and this time, they claim to be replacing the "Sleep Switch." We'll see what happens now.

I had sleep issues like you are describing when i first got my unibody mbp. I never had the issue of it completely running out of power but this may be because i rarely use it on the battery (3 months old, 6 cycles)
it would however have trouble going to sleep, wake up on its on fairly frequently while in clam shell and sometimes wouldnt wake up at all when i turned it on. It was also very unresponsive when it was new and performed worse than my black macbook for just about everything in OS X.

Anyway long story short i resolved it in a very strange way, by disabling the safesleep. This is where it writes the memory to the hard disk before going to sleep in case of power failure. I find this very unnecessary anyway so turned it off and since then my mbp has worked perfectly. You may want to try it. You can either find an application called smart sleep or do it the way i did using terminal

type
pmset -g | grep hibernatemode

at the terminal prompt to find your sleep mode (3 is default and is what was causing my problems)
terminal will return something like

hibernatemode 3

to change it you type

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

this will set it to the old sleep mode and not write the memory to the hard disk

full details and all options can be found here

http://www.macworld.com/article/53471/2006/10/sleepmode.html

 

[cubedweller]

Thanks. I'll definitely have to give it a shot when I get my MBP back from Apple (provided they don't fix it).

I do believe the machine should work 100% on default settings, so either way if they can't fix it this time, it will go back to them.. ::crosses fingers::

 

[yoak]

Update:
I went to an Apple shop today and complained about my issues, and the guy had one look at the battery conditions in system profile and just handed over a new battery.
So hopefully that solve my problems