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i7 MBP 15 battery life

RiCEADDiCTBOY

RiCEADDiCTBOY

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 26, 2007
699
1
I have become incredibly confused and frustrated as to why my MBP battery life has gone down the tube. I've had it around release date with minimal cycles. I've tried:
1. brightness reduction
2. turning off wifi/bluetooth
3. items that auto log when computer is turned on where removed (such as adobe updater)

Please advise before I go to the Apple Store.
 
alust2013 said:
Two questions, what do you do with the computer, and how long does the battery last?
Click to expand...

When it's on battery life, listen to music and typing documents. When it is plugged in I work on graphic designing and photography.

Battery life ranges from 4-3 hours... it starts off saying 5...but its always around 4-3. It's ridiculous.
 
Set up your MBP that it will force to Intel GPU when it's on battery. You'll never get 8 hours on the nvidia card.
 
I have a i5 2.4ghz Macbook Pro Mid 2010. First off, I had a 7K rpm drive battery performance was always around 4 hours and below. I swapped my drive for a 5k rpm drive and battery improved to 6-7 hours depending on usage. I bought a 8-9 hour Macbook Pro not 6-7. So I un-installed Flash player! Not because I hate it, but, because I had heard some rumors it drained the battery a lot. After the uninstall, my battery lasts from 8-9 hours as claimed, sometimes 7 but I do what ever i want with my laptop (videos, music, and anything system intense drains the battery). Overall I have noticed a marked improvement on my battery life. I also use the gfx graphics card software. Also, Firefox and Chrome always use Nvidia, Safari most of the time uses intel's.
 
Is it better to force your MBP to use the Intel or NVIDIA card on a daily basis? I know Chrome uses NVIDIA and that's my main browser (though I'm forcing Intel right now to test and it's working...)
 
I don't know too much about your specific model but the screen and keys on all of our MBPs are LED backlit and because of this, they have very, very, very little impact on energy consumption (literally a small fraction compared to previous laptop screens).
 
I haven't really measured, but I seem to be between 4-5 hours.

Chrome is my main browser. Beyond that, I'm working in CS5 and Photo Mechanic.

I've never tried the programs to force it to stay on one graphics card or the other. Now I'm curious, though.

Anyone else tried it without flash player and noticed a big difference?
 
thegreatdivorce said:
I haven't really measured, but I seem to be between 4-5 hours.

Chrome is my main browser. Beyond that, I'm working in CS5 and Photo Mechanic.

I've never tried the programs to force it to stay on one graphics card or the other. Now I'm curious, though.

Anyone else tried it without flash player and noticed a big difference?
Click to expand...

I too use Chrome and I like to keep lots of tabs open of all my favorite sites (like 20 tabs) and my battery life was sucking hard (on a 2010 i5 15" running the Intel GPU).

I'd watch my battery % and would notice huge cpu load with Chrome Renderer's (as seen in Activity Monitor) now and then. What's nice about Chrome, you can kill the one Renderer that sucking up all your CPU and you'll see a little frowny face on the tab of the web page that was causing the high CPU.

99% of the time the tab that was causing high CPU (and thus sucking up battery) was one where some kind of flash advertisement was playing SOOO..I installed a flash blocker program for chrome and my battery life shot up soon after.

In short, Flash can kill battery life very very quickly by spinning up that CPU. Try a flash blocker and see what you get.

On a side note, Adobe has released Flash 10.2 beta which I've found to be much much better with regard to CPU %. Also, a note on Chrome-you have to disable the built-in Flash engine to make use of the new beta standalone version of Flash.
 
My i5 2.4 will do around 7 hours or so with flash enabled and gfxcard installed (Great program,highly recommended) even running a 42" external display I can get around 5 hours.
Not the 8-9 hours Apple claim but to be honest I don`t think that is realistic or achievable unless you have almost nothing running and your display barely lit up.
Still miles better than the 2 hours max all my previous laptops could manage.
 
Go into System Profiler and then Hardware->Power and see what your Full charge capacity (mAh) is. It should be around 6900. If it's lower then your battery charge isn't so good anymore and you can try a calibration or take it in to an Apple store.

My i7 lasts around 3-4 hours on heavy use in the mornings, but around 6-7 hours with regular usage. You will only get the quoted times from Apple with screen brightness set really low, minimal WiFi usage and very little CPU usage. I also highly recommend gfxCardStatus. I constantly have mine running on the Intel GPU for normal tasks, and only switch to the nVidia chip when doing graphics intensive work like Photoshop or something.
 
Using flash will destroy all bets on your battery life. Version 10.2 or otherwise, software rendering takes massive amounts of CPU power to do, which takes massive amounts of battery.
 
I was just wondering about this 'Gfxcardstatus' - is that not the same as enabling 'Automatic Graphics Switching' in system preferences?

Just wondered, as i'd like to save my battery life as much as possible.

Thanks for any help or advice. :)
 
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