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Glassbook Pro - Disappointing Battery Life

E

Elotemuygrande

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 3, 2008
7
0
Two weeks ago I took home a new 15" MBP. Other than minor cosmetic style issues the only issue I've had is poor battery life.

She's a 15.4", 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM, 320GB 7200RPM drive.

I have bluetooth turned off and just browsing the web I'm getting maybe 3:15 of battery life. I pretty much just have Firefox and Adium up. I also turned tried turning the screen brightness down to 30% or so.

My late model white macbook was probably getting a full hour more of unplugged action.

I have "Better battery life" set which I believe should turn off the 9600m. I performed the steps in the calibration KB article last night. Coconut battery says my battery capacity is 4764 mAh which is higher than the rated capacity.

Is there anything else I can check? I thought people were doing much better than this on average from what I've read!
 
did you calibrate it? i'm not impressed with mbp batteries at all. i have had my battery less than a week and health is 95% already.
 
Elotemuygrande said:
Two weeks ago I took home a new 15" MBP. Other than minor cosmetic style issues the only issue I've had is poor battery life.

She's a 15.4", 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM, 320GB 7200RPM drive.

I have bluetooth turned off and just browsing the web I'm getting maybe 3:15 of battery life. I pretty much just have Firefox and Adium up. I also turned tried turning the screen brightness down to 30% or so.

My late model white macbook was probably getting a full hour more of unplugged action.

I have "Better battery life" set which I believe should turn off the 9600m. I performed the steps in the calibration KB article last night. Coconut battery says my battery capacity is 4764 mAh which is higher than the rated capacity.

Is there anything else I can check? I thought people were doing much better than this on average from what I've read!
Click to expand...

The problem is the 320Gb 7200RPM drive..
 
coolkamio said:
The problem is the 320Gb 7200RPM drive..
Click to expand...

No, I've got the stock 2.4 model, and I'm lucky to get about 4 hours of battery life. Haven't been able to get the full "5 hours of wireless productivity" that Apple advertised as of yet.

By "wireless productivity", did they mean literally wireless? As in, no connectivity? No WiFi, no BlueTooth, etc etc?
 
coolkamio said:
The problem is the 320Gb 7200RPM drive..
Click to expand...

Plausible, however I read on these forums before purchasing that the 7200rpm drive used little more power than the 5400rpm. Also, the HD should be virtually inactive when just browsing the web.
 
blurb23 said:
No, I've got the stock 2.4 model, and I'm lucky to get about 4 hours of battery life. Haven't been able to get the full "5 hours of wireless productivity" that Apple advertised as of yet.

By "wireless productivity", did they mean literally wireless? As in, no connectivity? No WiFi, no BlueTooth, etc etc?
Click to expand...

Exactly! Me too. Wonder if N mode wireless uses more power. I'll have to check life with WiFi turned off...
 
blurb23 said:
No, I've got the stock 2.4 model, and I'm lucky to get about 4 hours of battery life. Haven't been able to get the full "5 hours of wireless productivity" that Apple advertised as of yet.

By "wireless productivity", did they mean literally wireless? As in, no connectivity? No WiFi, no BlueTooth, etc etc?
Click to expand...

"Testing conducted by Apple in October 2008 using preproduction 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo–based MacBook Pro units with a Better Battery Life setting. Battery life depends on configuration and use. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information. The wireless productivity test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing various websites and editing text in a word processing document with display brightness set to 50%."
 
just don't check your battery health and it wont bother you so much.

F apple for reducing the capacity. Doesn't bother me really except they didn't reduce the price.
 
I actually figured something out that made a huge difference. In both Firefox and Safari, the browser will stay at a constant 18-20% cpu after viewing ANY Flash even after the video stops and the page is closed. This is with the latest Flash 10. Disabling Flash in my browser takes me back down to ~5% ongoing CPU usage with a lot of sites open which makes the battery time left show almost 5 hours.

Note, I tried several times and using the Flashblock extension was NOT enough, I had to completely disable the Flash plugin.

Sucks for youtube... My next project is figuring out how to download youtube videos instead of watching with the GD Flash plugin.

I also noted that the Flash plugin for Opera used roughly HALF the CPU of Flash for Firefox and Safari for some reason...not switching to Opera though...
 
Elotemuygrande said:
I actually figured something out that made a huge difference. In both Firefox and Safari, the browser will stay at a constant 18-20% cpu after viewing ANY Flash even after the video stops and the page is closed. This is with the latest Flash 10. Disabling Flash in my browser takes me back down to ~5% ongoing CPU usage with a lot of sites open which makes the battery time left show almost 5 hours.

Note, I tried several times and using the Flashblock extension was NOT enough, I had to completely disable the Flash plugin.

Sucks for youtube... My next project is figuring out how to download youtube videos instead of watching with the GD Flash plugin.

I also noted that the Flash plugin for Opera used roughly HALF the CPU of Flash for Firefox and Safari for some reason...not switching to Opera though...
Click to expand...

I've seen a similar thing happen also. I've found that I have to empty the cache in Safari to get the CPU usage back down. It also seems to me that it's not any flash, some sites cause this to happen and some don't. I don't know what the pattern is, but it sure seems like Flash 10 causes this to happen.

How did you "disable" flash in the browser? The only way I know of is removing the plug-in from the plug-in directory.
 
Elotemuygrande said:
Sucks for youtube... My next project is figuring out how to download youtube videos instead of watching with the GD Flash plugin.
.
Click to expand...

Download them using http://www.keepvid.com

image.php
 
Fixed my battery life issues!!!

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=962235&p=5058165#p5058165

Got Firefox to stop keeping Flash vids loaded forever which was continually eating CPU. I now get the ~5 hours promised :)

I realize that Flash videos naturally eat video, but the issue was that they kept eating it for hours after the tab where the video was playing was closed.

Safari has the same irritating behavior so Apple must have done there "wireless productivity" tests using only sites which contain no flash video content...
 
Yeah flash is a battery eater.

Also, for those of you that don't use IR turn it off in the security system pref and bluetooth. That should give you extra life.
 
Elotemuygrande said:
Fixed my battery life issues!!!

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=962235&p=5058165#p5058165

Got Firefox to stop keeping Flash vids loaded forever which was continually eating CPU. I now get the ~5 hours promised :)
Click to expand...

Great tip! I don't run FF on my MBP (known resource hog). But how do you configure Safari to stop caching the flash videos?

Btw, I always clear my cache after watching videos in Safari due to hiccups and delays when watching other videos. I knew this was an issue in Safari but I didn't know what was causing it.
 
Nice to hear its fixed and 5 hours are possible. thats half an hour more than i get with my early 08 2,5 model.
Btw the 7200 hdd should have an influence below a few minutes in terms of battery life because its an addition of maybe 0,1-0,5W on a total of 12-25W (browsing the inernet) powerconsumption! And even that depends on which hdds are compared. New WD or Seagate 320 7200 drives use less power than older 5400 drives!!
 
I don't often view flash videos, but it's nice to know that that would be the case.

As is I get a little over 5 hours of battery life. I'll keep all of this in mind further on down the road. Thanks guys.
 
I'm new to the forums and a potential MBP owner (within the next few weeks). I read about battery life issues with the MBP and to tell the truth, it;s been more that I've ever gotten with a PC laptop. I'm lucky if I've ever pulled 2 hours out of any battery in a PC Laptop. I'm reading 3 hours + in some of these posts. Sounds better than what I've put up with in the PC market.
 
I duno about you guys but my 2.53ghz mbp is giving me around 5:05 of battery time on the 9400m gt with brightness on 1 notch.
 
Thanks for the Firefox config. I think it helped my MBP to have more battery life. But I think I'm still far from the 5h on 9400. I'd say around 3.30 of pure browsing. 99% baterry life + calibrated
 
Battery life is so far good for me. I also bought a second battery with the computer, so I can last a day unplugged.
 
Elotemuygrande said:
Fixed my battery life issues!!!

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=962235&p=5058165#p5058165

Got Firefox to stop keeping Flash vids loaded forever which was continually eating CPU. I now get the ~5 hours promised :)

I realize that Flash videos naturally eat video, but the issue was that they kept eating it for hours after the tab where the video was playing was closed.

Safari has the same irritating behavior so Apple must have done there "wireless productivity" tests using only sites which contain no flash video content...
Click to expand...

I'm unsure on how to implement this, could you be more specific in how you did it.

Cheers
 
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