kind of worried... memory + battery

[sr5878]

hey all

i just checked istat a few mins ago and i was somewhat surprised at what i saw. i cant say i know what any of it means, but i wanted to put it up for you guys to see if its something i should be worried about. also, how did, after one restart, my battery charge go down 1 hour? i am unplugged so i know it would go down, but does a restart really take that much juice??

your input is greatly appreciated.

top one is before the restart, bottom one is right after. 2.2ghz 15" sr mbp bought 2 months ago, 2gb ram.

edit: now battery still says 65% but 2:21 battery life

 

[kolax]

Restarting the computer does use more battery power than just putting it to sleep - nothing on a big margin though.

Have you calibrated your battery recently?

Also bear in mind that the estimated battery life displayed varies with what you are doing. If you have the brightness up full then you'll get hardly any battery life, turn the brightness down a lot and you'll get a lot more juice. Same applies for doing anything that demands a lot of CPU usage.

 

[Applespider]

The battery life depends on what you're doing on the computer at the time.

If you hadn't been doing much before you shut it down, just reading webpages then it's probably fairly high.

The activity when the Mac starts up - in terms of how much it's using its hard drive etc - is greater, so the battery life is estimated on that same level of activity being used continually - so it drops.

You can see it if you try ripping a CD while on battery power, your time remaining will plummet while you rip it and then go back up when it finishes.

 

[sr5878]

yes i have

my main concern is the swap/pagein/pageout thing on the memory meter... does this mean that i am maxing out on my ram and should buy more?

 

[CanadaRAM]

yes i have

my main concern is the swap/pagein/pageout thing on the memory meter... does this mean that i am maxing out on my ram and should buy more?

Your PageOuts are running about 5% of your PageIns, which is just right.
Ideally, 0% means you never have a slow down, you are always operating within your installed RAM, but 5% is quite good.

Of course, if you start opening more and bigger programs, then the PageOuts will jump up, and then more RAM would help. Also, if you are doing serious Photoshop or Final Cut or digital audio or video production, then put in as much RAM as you can budget for.