Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Lacrosseboss18

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Im looking to get my first Macbook Pro 13 this weekend. I'm going to be purchasing it for school and my number one concern is battery life. I don't always have access to a plug so its kind of an issue.

I was wondering what type of battery life i could expect. I would be running parallel on the machine as i want to continue to use Microsoft Onenote for all my note taking. I would also leave the internet on as i sometimes jump online to look something up. I wouldn't be doing a lot of browsing just the occasional search and downloading the class powerpoints for the day. I would keep the screen brightness down to the lowest or a notch or two up from the lowest.

I was also wondering with Parallel, if i was to download a pdf file while on my Mac OS could i locate the file one i open Windows XP in Parallel or would i have to open parallel, and use the web browser from within Windows to import my files?

Thanks for all the help
 
Your battery life is dependent on a number of things, including screen brightness, WiFi, bluetooth, apps/processes/widgets you have running, Flash on websites, health of your battery, type of internal drive you have, how much free space and RAM you have, etc. It's truly a case of YMMV. This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:
 
I've got my Parallels configured so that anything I have on my OSX desktop also appears on my Windoze desktop so that they can be accessed by either OSs. Not sure how I configured it or whether it was by fluke; it was quite a while ago when I did the setup.
 
I assume your battery life with Parallel will be roughly 2hrs...at least that's what mine estimated 😱
 
I assume your battery life with Parallel will be roughly 2hrs...at least that's what mine estimated 😱

I'm running vmware fusion on my 15" mbp and get around 2.5-3 hours running a windows 7 vm (installing software, updates, etc).
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.