This morning I was having some major problems with battery life and heat. My new (5 months old) MBP 17" would eat through a battery after just 1.5 hours! CRAZY NUTS! So I put a post on here and ended up finding a sweet little tweak that massively increased my battery life. I then applied the same trick to a new Uni-Body MB 13" and now have over 5.5 hrs of battery life with Wireless and VPN running (also running VNC)!
Many People already know about Fan Control...... if you don't GET IT! then if you don't use spotlight... I have had a mac now for 4 years and have never once used spotlight. then do the fallowing:
Open up the activity monitor. In the flitter box type ATSServer. take note the amount of % of CPU it is using. (if you have a ton of PDF files like I do. this number will be very high! or can get very high) basically the program works for Spotlight and catalogs every thing on your computer and apparently it takes a lot of power to do it. if you never use spotlight like I do then its wasted power! and battery life if you on a laptop.
Now open up system profiler (in the utilities part of you application folder) and click on power under hardware. take note of the Amperage you system is using. Its listed in MV (1000mA = 1 amp) when I checked mine the first time it was at almost 4 amps!
so to fix this little problem:
System Pref -> Spotlight. Chose the Privacy tab. hit the add button at the bottom and select Mac HD (or what ever you hard drive is) this will tell spotlight to ignore you HD for indexing. If you have a iDisk, select it too. I also keep alot of file on my iDisk.
If the % of CPU ATSServer was using before was high go back and check it again! mine dropped from 200% (not sure how thats possible) to 5% and with it the amperage that my computer was using fell by more then 75%
Go back and recheck the system amperage again (you may need to hit CMD+R to get it to refresh)
when i check back with mine it was less then 1 amp!
I also set my fan control up a little differently:
here are my settings. for me this is a good balance of system cooling and battery life.
Base speed = 2600RPM's
Lower Threshold = 111*F
Upper Threshold = 158*F
For me this keeps the computer at a cool stable point of around 104*F - 110*F during normal simple operations and during charing it doesn't let it get above 130*F (50*C)
I set the upper threshold at a its lowest point so that it would try to cool the machine a lot more aggressively if it started to get hot. To me this is the balance between keeping the machine cool and not using to much power to do it. but at the same time not risking letting it get to hot.
This worked very well for me as I now have a 5+ hour battery on my MBP with wireless on! I never thought I would see the day!
Hope this helps every one with MBP Battery & heat problems! before i found this i though it was a battery issue and was looking to spend $170+ on a new one or even a external $400+ battery pack.
Many People already know about Fan Control...... if you don't GET IT! then if you don't use spotlight... I have had a mac now for 4 years and have never once used spotlight. then do the fallowing:
Open up the activity monitor. In the flitter box type ATSServer. take note the amount of % of CPU it is using. (if you have a ton of PDF files like I do. this number will be very high! or can get very high) basically the program works for Spotlight and catalogs every thing on your computer and apparently it takes a lot of power to do it. if you never use spotlight like I do then its wasted power! and battery life if you on a laptop.
Now open up system profiler (in the utilities part of you application folder) and click on power under hardware. take note of the Amperage you system is using. Its listed in MV (1000mA = 1 amp) when I checked mine the first time it was at almost 4 amps!
so to fix this little problem:
System Pref -> Spotlight. Chose the Privacy tab. hit the add button at the bottom and select Mac HD (or what ever you hard drive is) this will tell spotlight to ignore you HD for indexing. If you have a iDisk, select it too. I also keep alot of file on my iDisk.
If the % of CPU ATSServer was using before was high go back and check it again! mine dropped from 200% (not sure how thats possible) to 5% and with it the amperage that my computer was using fell by more then 75%
Go back and recheck the system amperage again (you may need to hit CMD+R to get it to refresh)
when i check back with mine it was less then 1 amp!
I also set my fan control up a little differently:
here are my settings. for me this is a good balance of system cooling and battery life.
Base speed = 2600RPM's
Lower Threshold = 111*F
Upper Threshold = 158*F
For me this keeps the computer at a cool stable point of around 104*F - 110*F during normal simple operations and during charing it doesn't let it get above 130*F (50*C)
I set the upper threshold at a its lowest point so that it would try to cool the machine a lot more aggressively if it started to get hot. To me this is the balance between keeping the machine cool and not using to much power to do it. but at the same time not risking letting it get to hot.
This worked very well for me as I now have a 5+ hour battery on my MBP with wireless on! I never thought I would see the day!
Hope this helps every one with MBP Battery & heat problems! before i found this i though it was a battery issue and was looking to spend $170+ on a new one or even a external $400+ battery pack.
