Battery life on my refurb MBP

[drummerguy45]

I recently(less than a week ago) purchased a refurb macbook pro from apple. Everything is absolutey wonderful except for one thing.. my battery life. I charge it all the way up, unplug it, and in less than 5 minutes it drops to 99%, then slowly decreases and after only using it for web browsing(airport was on, bluetooth not, only app running was firefox) i was at 49%.... The estimated battery time on a full charge is only 2:50?! i expected more.. is this normal?? The model is the early 2009 model so maybe thats normal with them?? I'm worried because if i want to do any design(photoshop cs3) on the go, I dont know how long the battery will last. And another thing is that istat pro is saying that i have 100% bat health. Advice? Knowledge?Anything will help ease my mind, I would like to know i didnt make a mistake by going refurb . Here are the specs from my checkout thing from the apple website---RFB MBP 15.4/2.53/2X2GB/320/SD/512VM-USA.--- So yeah, please give this mac newbie some advice.. i dont want to buy a new battery but if i'll get a longer time using my mbp with it I would do it.

thanks

 

[spinnerlys]

Battery health at 100% means it still has 100% of its original capacity (3-4000 mAh) to fall back on.

Battery life depends on capacity and usage. Have you looked at System Preferences > Energy Saver and checked if Better Battery Life or Higher Performance is checked. The first uses the integrated graphics card, the second the dedicated card, which uses more power thus more battery.

Also check the brightness is set not to full.

MRoogle might also help you finding lots and lots of similar questions about this.

And 5 minutes for 1% of battery capacity is not bad. It would mean, you could get up to 500 minutes of battery life, which is not happening of course. I had the same MBP as you, and 2-3 hours of battery capacity was the norm doing browsing and some photodoodling. Some could/can even make it to four hours.

 

[drummerguy45]

okay.. well it's good to know that it's normal. yeah i have the brightness way down, keyboard backlight is off, using the energy save preferences.. any way to get more battery life? Like buying some other kind of battery or something? I dont know if that's a dumb question as i dont know anything about batteries in general haha

 

[drummerguy45]

well now after only 5 days of having it, im at 99% bat health and after five minutes i've lost 4% charge... :/

 

[spinnerlys]

Have a look at Activity Monitor (select Show All Processes) and see if some process hogs up the CPU.

Also, the battery statistics might be not 100% accurate, so don't obsess about this.

If you see a rapid decline in battery health, and it doesn't recover, then you can contact Apple. If you have less than 80% battery health with less than 300 battery cycles you can get a replacement battery.


Have you also calibrated the battery?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490
http://www.apple.com/batteries/

 

[revs]

Calibrate the battery - i.e. use it all day until the computer turns off due to low battery, then leave it overnight so every last drop of battery is used, then plug in the laptop and leave it charge to 100%, and then leave it plugged in for a couple of hours.

Then use it normally, and see how many minutes you get.

If its bad then apple will probably just give you a new battery free. and as mentioned, if the battery health is under 80% with less than 300 cycles, you also get a free battery from apple.

again to echo the above - dont get obsessed with the battery. just use the computer! people on macrumors are so obsessed with the battery/cycles/health count!

 

[Little Endian]

Oddly enough the model you purchased was the same one that I was considering a couple of months ago. I eventually opted to purchase a newer model refurbished 2.66 15" MBP with the 7 hour built in battery. I worry about battery health as well, but what matters the most is how long your battery lasts in aggregate real world use. Don't pay to much attention to the battery life indicator in the menu bar as it does fluctuate with use. Also Google search for a free app called Coconut Battery as it gives battery info in a nifty interface, or if you are comfortable with the terminal run "ioreg -l | grep Capacity" to get detailed battery life info. System profiler also gives battery and power info as well.

My Battery will easily last 5-6 hours with half screen brightness and better battery life settings when doing web browsing, word processing, etc. Important to note though is be sure Flash is not running like crazy on websites that you may visit as it can spool your processor up to 100% plus utilization and this will kill your battery life quick. If you are getting at least about 4 hours with light web browsing I would say that is normal for your particular model seeing the 5-6 hours that Apple states for your particular model requires some pretty unrealistic energy conservation measures.