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Early 2011 MBP Battery lasts 2 hours.

S

sophtware

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 23, 2011
1
0
I have a new MBP early 2011 model. I get no more than 2 hours of battery life no matter what I do. The MBP has two upgrades:

1. HDD replace with an Hitachi TravelStar 5K750
2. RAM upgraded to 8GB with 1067 DDR3

I've turned off blue tooth, unloaded unnecessary services, tried it with and without WiFi on. Nothing is working. I've charged the battery fully, then drained it completely, then recharged. Still nothing. I get just 2 hours.

The HDD replacement uses LESS wattage then the drive that was in there. I'm just not sure about the extra memory.

This is driving me nuts. I travel a lot and spend 4+ hours in a plane most of the time, so good battery life is a must for me. At least with my older MBP I had spare batteries and I could change them out during the flight.

I bought this new MBP to eliminate the need to carry those extra batteries. Has anyone seen this before? Or, have a solution?
 
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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:
______________________________________________________​
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This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:
Apple Notebook Battery FAQ by GGJstudios
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If you don't have any heavy apps/processes running, you might check with Apple because the battery might be bad.
 
sophtware said:
I have a new MBP early 2011 model. I get no more than 2 hours of battery life no matter what I do. The MBP has two upgrades:

1. HDD replace with an Hitachi TravelStar 5K750
2. RAM upgraded to 8GB with 1067 DDR3

I've turned off blue tooth, unloaded unnecessary services, tried it with and without WiFi on. Nothing is working. I've charged the battery fully, then drained it completely, then recharged. Still nothing. I get just 2 hours.

The HDD replacement uses LESS wattage then the drive that was in there. I'm just not sure about the extra memory.

This is driving me nuts. I travel a lot and spend 4+ hours in a plane most of the time, so good battery life is a must for me. At least with my older MBP I had spare batteries and I could change them out during the flight.

I bought this new MBP to eliminate the need to carry those extra batteries. Has anyone seen this before? Or, have a solution?
Click to expand...

Apps?
 
sophtware said:
I have a new MBP early 2011 model. I get no more than 2 hours of battery life no matter what I do. The MBP has two upgrades:

1. HDD replace with an Hitachi TravelStar 5K750
2. RAM upgraded to 8GB with 1067 DDR3

I've turned off blue tooth, unloaded unnecessary services, tried it with and without WiFi on. Nothing is working. I've charged the battery fully, then drained it completely, then recharged. Still nothing. I get just 2 hours.

The HDD replacement uses LESS wattage then the drive that was in there. I'm just not sure about the extra memory.

This is driving me nuts. I travel a lot and spend 4+ hours in a plane most of the time, so good battery life is a must for me. At least with my older MBP I had spare batteries and I could change them out during the flight.

I bought this new MBP to eliminate the need to carry those extra batteries. Has anyone seen this before? Or, have a solution?
Click to expand...

What programs are you using? Anything CPU or HDD intensive will eat battery, if you're running virtualization, rendering in Photoshop, etc, your battery life will suffer.
 
As others have said, use Activity Monitor to pinpoint the process that may be taking excessive CPU percentage. Also, since (I presume) the laptop is brand new, the Finder could temporarily be indexing the Hard Drive - taking up CPU and decreasing battery life.
 
Who did the RAM upgrade, you or apple?

Reason i'm asking is if you did the upgrades, then was the battery life good before adding the RAM and HDD? Obviously, if it started happening immediately after, then it has to do with one of those 2 upgrades. The easiest thing to do would be to put back the original 4gb if you did the upgrade and see if the problem persists. It is possible you got a bad battery, but you can rule that out if the laptop performed fine before the upgrade.
 
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