Battery Life, Macbook Pro, Santa Rosa? (2.4, Tiger) SOMETHING WRONG? ? ?

[hiimamac]

My MBP is a 2.4 (Santa Rosa?) the MBP that was the last version released before the track pad had multi gesture.

The battery has 71 cycles (so I should have 229 full cycles) and with the screen at 75% (12 clicks, total is 16 clicks for FULL brightness), my battery life is 2:54 after about 10-15 minutes. I have not played any games. The only intensive thing I did was perform a disk utility verify and repaid disk.

As well, I am running Tiger 10.4.11 and wonder if this has anything to do with it. I own Leopard but have not installed it on my macbook pro - just on an external drive that I boot up to in Target mode most of the time. (was waiting for various music software to catch up and think I can upgrade now)...

What is the normal batter life with WIFI on, and browsing, using pages to write and brightness at 75%.

**** STOPPED TYPING AND DOWNLOADED COCONUT BATTERY*****
Is there anyway to down clock GPU or CPU in order to get battery battery life? I also ran coconut battery and from the time I typed *** STOPPED TYPING TO HERE*** I searched for Coconut online, downloaded it and ran it, battery went from 2:54-2:03!! WHAT???

Anyway, downloading Coconut, and running widgets (so I could use the calculator) shouldn't have used so much power so quickly..... and the cocout shows:

Current Capacity" 4800
Original Capcity 5500
That's a difference of 13% with only 70 cycles or so. Laptop is 10 months old.
Would I qualify for a new battery?

Maybe there is something running in the background that I don't know about?

Please help and or advise.

Its not the end of the world, Lord knows, but still I want to make sure I have the best performance form my battery (not to be confused with my setting of better battery life, LOL), but is there something running in the background that I don't know about? Activity monitor shows some spikes in activity but there is nothing in the START UPON BOOTING and I closed a few threads and saw little difference - - is there something to read about tweaking CPU/GPU, turning off threads and getting the best performance for:

a) Browsing the web
b) Using Pages

Again, would the OS make a difference? Running Tiger on internal - Leopard on external TARGET mode.

Thanks

 

[BlueRevolution]

The battery has 71 cycles (so I should have 229 full cycles)...

Would I qualify for a new battery?

That depends. Would you qualify to buy yourself a new battery or to make Apple do it for you? I don't see any problem. Your battery is behaving like any other laptop battery does as it ages.

 

[TH-Gunner]

Don't listen to the silly remaining time *estimation*. That's all it is, based on what you're doing at the polling interval. It fluctuates and it's not accurate at all.

To check what kind of battery life you're getting, do the following:

Just use your laptop for a while (30% or so), then check your uptime (via iStat or by typing "uptime" in the Terminal). Now divide the number of minutes your system has been on by the % you've used so far (~30%). That'll give you your average "minutes per percent."

For example, if I get about 1 hour for 25%, so that's ~2.4 minutes for every percent. So for 100%, that's 2.4 * 100 = 240 min = 4 hours. So I'll get about 4 hours of battery life.

 

[brop52]

I see you posted the same thing in Apple Discussions. Take your pick on where to post it. See my response there. It involves calibration, SMC reset, turning off bluetooth and IR.