Mountain Lion and Macbook Pro battery

[andy8]

I remember when I was on Snow Leopard my battery usually 'behaved' logically - I had 5-6 hours of proper battery life and my Macbook Pro (2.26GHz) was a late 2009 model. As soon as I upgraded to Lion, my battery only held about 2 hours plus charge.

It shows 6-7 hours and then quickly drops down to 2 plus hours. It was as though Apple was encouraging users to change their batteries with the Lion OSX upgrade. Now with M.Lion releasing soon, I don't know what we should expect.
Hopefully Apple has fixed this problem.

P.S : I did get my battery checked at Apple Store and I was told that my battery was healthy and I should be able to retain 6-7 hours of charge. But, the battery; of course fails to last that long. I was told to replace my battery which I felt was foolish to do as :

1) It's expensive
2) It's still healthy according to Apple Employers at least !

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

I have the same MBP and Lion did not significantly affect battery performance. Did you do an upgrade or a clean install?

 

[andy8]

I have the same MBP and Lion did not significantly affect battery performance. Did you do an upgrade or a clean install?

I did a clean install and have done so a few times now during the past year and this year. I've always made sure my system is Real Clean so, I find it difficult to understand the change of charge retention of my battery.

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

Did you disable local TimeMachine backups? If not, that might eat your battery...

 

[andy8]

Did you disable local TimeMachine backups? If not, that might eat your battery...

My Time Machine setting on System Preferences is always switched off. I enable it manually whenever I need to backup to my external hard disk.

 

[Christoffee]

I am so nervous about upgrading to ML. In terms of battery the move from SL to Lion was a disaster. It finally got fixed with the updates in Jan/Feb, and I now get great battery life again.

But Apple never admitted the problem as far as I can tell, and the guys in the shops were ignorant or lying. I will be watching the battery issue closely before I upgrade and I'd love the comments of those who have upgraded, especially those that had problems with Lion, be they fixed or otherwise.

Lots of people are complaining at the moment, but I think indexing is a problem in the first hours, and I imagine the OS needs a day or so to settle down.