Good battery life on UMBP 17

[Thomas Davie]

I received my UMBP 17 on April 13, took it home and plugged it in and started using it. Configured it over the course of the next couple of days and last Friday (a day off) figured I'd calibrate it. So I unplugged it and started using it. Screen set to about 2/3 brightness, wireless on, bluetooth off. Programs that were open included Mail (minimized), Firefox and Parallels 4.0

About 2/3's of the time, I was playing Civilization 3 inside of a virtual Win XP Pro machine set for 2 cpu's and 1 gb ram. Periodically switch to Firefox, but leave Parallels open. Once or twice, I quit Parallels and returned ot just browsing in Firefox.

I got just over 4 hours before my machine went to sleep. As a side note, as soon as I received the low battery warning, I shut everything down and waited.

Just thought I would say somethnin good about the UMBP 17 battery.

Tom

 

[aleni]

my pattern of usage allows me to get 4.5-5 hours of battery before the warning shows up. it's not 8 hours as promised but hell it's OK for me!

use it on the bed at 6PM till i sleep at 11PM and never need to move my charger from my desk, it's what i want from a notebook.

 

[Pagga]

I have gotten more and more battery life out of this thing since I
got it back in february. At first I reckoned 6 hours, but now I´m
close to 7 or even 8 if I turn of Airport. My main use of battery
life is Word. I use low end graphics card and leave bluetooth off.

Remember, the battery has to be broken in before it reaches full capasity.
Both Apple and (some) people here says it doesn´t need calibration, but
I´ve done it at least five times, with better and better results each time.

P

 

[Thomas Davie]

Yup, I forgot to add that I was using the 9400 graphics rather than the 9600. I expect that if I was only surfing, email, downloading I would get significantly better battery life. As it was, I was quite happy to get 4 hours running a game under Windows. And just remembered, the cpu temperature, at least according to istat, did not go above 53C.

At no time did the case every get warm to the touch, let alone egg cooking hot.

Tom