My solution to the Lion battery life issue

[ABadSanta]

I experienced what seemed quite prevalent on these forums: dismal battery life after the transition to Lion. On Snow Leopard, my computer got 5-6 hours of battery life while browsing the internet, word processing, and spotify on roughly 40% brightness.

On Lion, I got 3-4 hours under the same exact conditions.

I tried everything, including checking my activity monitor, doing a fresh install of Lion, and I even tried turning my brightness to almost the lowest possible to try to get the same battery life.

I then installed gfxcardstatus, to see whether my integrated or dedicated card was running. Turns out, my computer would turn on the dedicated card when I launched Chrome...

I set it to Integrated only, and now i get more than 6 hours of battery life doing the same tasks.

Thought I'd share this with you all. I hope I can help anyone else who has a problem with battery life.

My computer: 2011 MBP 15" 2.0 ghz i7, HR Anti Glare, 8 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD @ 7200 rpm

Cheers

ABadSanta

 

[altecXP]

I experienced what seemed quite prevalent on these forums: dismal battery life after the transition to Lion. On Snow Leopard, my computer got 5-6 hours of battery life while browsing the internet, word processing, and spotify on roughly 40% brightness.

On Lion, I got 3-4 hours under the same exact conditions.

I tried everything, including checking my activity monitor, doing a fresh install of Lion, and I even tried turning my brightness to almost the lowest possible to try to get the same battery life.

I then installed gfxcardstatus, to see whether my integrated or dedicated card was running. Turns out, my computer would turn on the dedicated card when I launched Chrome...

I set it to Integrated only, and now i get more than 6 hours of battery life doing the same tasks.

Thought I'd share this with you all. I hope I can help anyone else who has a problem with battery life.

My computer: 2011 MBP 15" 2.0 ghz i7, HR Anti Glare, 8 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD @ 7200 rpm

Cheers

ABadSanta

Chrome has that problem in SL too. It's nothing new.

 

[ABadSanta]

Chrome has that problem in SL too. It's nothing new.

Right, which is unfortunate. Regardless though, I have found that keeping my computer on the integrated chip saves a lot of battery life.

 

[GGJstudios]

I'm glad the OP found this, but this info has been available for some time now:

If you're using a MacBook Pro with both integrated and discrete graphics cards, you can install gfxCardStatus to manually select your integrated GPU, which will help reduce power demands and give you more life on a battery charge.

This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:

Apple Notebook Battery FAQ​