Fried battery...kind of

[TwoSocEmBoppers]

Hey all...I have a 15" 2.53 C2D MBP and have just arrived in the UK from the US. I noticed on the MBP charger that it can take up to 240V, thus only requiring an adapter and not a voltage converter to charge my computer. However, a week into my trip my battery is almost shot. After a full charge the most I can get out of it is about 2 hours. I have noticed that my computer is running hotter than it did back in the states. Not sure if maybe its running hotter, thus using more battery???

Any ideas? I'm thinking it may be the input voltage into the charger is damaging my computer but I'm not sure.

Will buying a new battery help or in a couple of weeks will that one be limited as well?

Thanks!

 

[moel]

Recalibrate your battery.

There is absolutely no reason why the different voltages would have anything to do with it, as it only outputs about 18volts anyway.

Also grab coconut battery, and see what it tells you about the healthy of your current battery.

 

[ryannazaretian]

Shorter battery life and running hotter are symptoms of an out of control process. Open up activity monitor and see what it says. I've had the MDS process run out of control before and brought my battery life down from 4 hours to 1:30. It ran hot as well due to the extra processing.

So yea, I don't think it's from running it on 240V (you would see other symptoms such as smoke/fire, and not turning on if that were the case). The running hotter and shorter battery life has got to be from some out of control process.

 

[TwoSocEmBoppers]

Recalibrate your battery.

There is absolutely no reason why the different voltages would have anything to do with it, as it only outputs about 18volts anyway.

Also grab coconut battery, and see what it tells you about the healthy of your current battery.

I do have Coconut battery and it says my battery still has 91% of its life left. I'll recalibrate tonight, thats a good idea.

Shorter battery life and running hotter are symptoms of an out of control process. Open up activity monitor and see what it says. I've had the MDS process run out of control before and brought my battery life down from 4 hours to 1:30. It ran hot as well due to the extra processing.

So yea, I don't think it's from running it on 240V (you would see other symptoms such as smoke/fire, and not turning on if that were the case). The running hotter and shorter battery life has got to be from some out of control process.

Good call. Gonna check that out and see whats up. What did you do to get the MDS back into control?

 

[ryannazaretian]

I do have Coconut battery and it says my battery still has 91% of its life left. I'll recalibrate tonight, thats a good idea.



Good call. Gonna check that out and see whats up. What did you do to get the MDS back into control?

Well, MDS is weird. It's for Spotlight. Apparently a corrupt index file causes the problem.
Instructions:

Go to the Apple in the top left. Click System Preferences. On the first section (Personal), the very last icon should say Spotlight. Click on it.

Click on the Privacy tab, then click the + sign. Add MacHD (or whatever your main OSX partition is named), then click Choose.

I prefer to restart the computer at this point just to make sure it's cleared out. I don't believe it's necessary though.

If you restarted, get back into the Spotlight preferences, then remove your OSX partition from the Privacy list. This will rebuild the Spotlight index file.

I've also noticed that Spotlight just gets stuck quite a bit as well. Try to remember after every search to clear out the search box in Spotlight.

So you search for something. Command + Spacebar, then you type something in such as "Safari." It searches for it. Then it might continue to search for it even though you found it. To clear it out, press Command + Spacebar again to open up the search, then simply press the Escape button. This will clear out the search and should leave the MDS process at idle.

Hopefully this helps.

I'd also recommend repairing disk permissions using Disk Utility to fix random problems.