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Short battery life in SL, any ideas?

D

Davidkoh

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 2, 2008
1,060
19
Hey all!

I got the 13" MBP (2.26 Ghz model), and it was first shipped with Leopard and I ran that for 4 weeks before my $10 upgrade disc or whatever came with SL. On Leopard I had no problem getting the 7 hours of battery life while surfing, hell I even copied **** from external drives, played games, torrented, installed **** when I first got it for like 5 hours on battery and still had 20% left. So under heavy use I got alot of battery life.

My problems occured when I installed SL, now I can't even get the "estimated time" meter to go past 6 hours no matter what I do. Also just normal wifi work will give me around 4-5 hours. This is a BIG downgrade since I got better battery life doing heavy tasks on Leopard.

I did a clean install when I got the SL disc, and I have since then switched to a SSD and ofc I did a clean install on that. PRAM/SMC and all that have been reset and I just performed a calibration last night and the problem still persists. Any ideas?

// David
 
Try running Activity Monitor to see if anything is placing a consistent heavy load on the CPU. I found that Carbonite & AntiVirus would each use 100% cpu pretty consistently. Turning them off changed my (battery) life from 2 hours to 8 ... (13" uMBP)
 
Sirolway said:
Try running Activity Monitor to see if anything is placing a consistent heavy load on the CPU. I found that Carbonite & AntiVirus would each use 100% cpu pretty consistently. Turning them off changed my (battery) life from 2 hours to 8 ... (13" uMBP)
Click to expand...

Except for Firefox taking 10-20% CPU theres nothing else under "All Processes", and since I ran Firefox on Leopard too it shouldn't lower the battery life.
 
Firefox taking 20% cpu? That seems alot, are you by any chance running sites with alot of flash? Flash eats battery, Safari is usung approx 2% cpu power here atm, with 4 tabs open.
 
cluthz said:
Firefox taking 20% cpu? That seems alot, are you by any chance running sites with alot of flash? Flash eats battery, Safari is usung approx 2% cpu power here atm, with 4 tabs open.
Click to expand...

Nothing more then 2 forums. And as I said, since I ran Firefox doing the same things in Leopard and got longer battery life the only "different" factor is SL.
 
Not really an answer but may help to see if it is firefox causing the problem. Try quitting firefox and using safari and see if the battery life it any better.
 
stridemat said:
Not really an answer but may help to see if it is firefox causing the problem. Try quitting firefox and using safari and see if the battery life it any better.
Click to expand...

Well even with firefox closed and just in finder even the estimated time is just 6:15. And the estimate is usually too high (in Leopard it used to be 8+ hours).

Also, I'd rather use Leopard then a bad functioning browser.

I'm hoping there's some kind of fix for this problem.
 
...did you have your screen brightness lower in Lep vs SL?

When you did a clean install of the SL, it may have gone with higher default settings for items such as brightness vs what you were using...

Try adjusting those and let us know.
 
J&JPolangin said:
...did you have your screen brightness lower in Lep vs SL?

When you did a clean install of the SL, it may have gone with higher default settings for items such as brightness vs what you were using...

Try adjusting those and let us know.
Click to expand...

Nah, when I tested in Leopard the most extreme time I got at around 30-40%. Now I tried at 1 bar in snow leopard and it ran out quicker. Im not only talking about the "estimated time", im talking about the actual percentage decline. Before I could use it for like 3-3.5 hours before I was at 50% (with keyboard light at 2 bars and screen at 5-6 bars), now its 2-2.5 (with keyboard light off and screen at 2-3 bars) ...
 
I just got a new battery for my 2007 MacBook Pro a few months ago, after my other battery died. I was getting upwards of 3 hours 20 minutes on this battery under Leopard. Under Snow Leopard, I am lucky to get an hour and a half.
 
13" MBPs with the 9CC2 display panel have a much brighter display under snow leopard; this drains the battery much faster. This could be your case, check your panel model.
 
Mhmm said:
13" MBPs with the 9CC2 display panel have a much brighter display under snow leopard; this drains the battery much faster. This could be your case, check your panel model.
Click to expand...

No idea how to do that, but it seems strange that I'd get more power drain on 1 bar on screen brightness now then when I had 6 bars before. I'll most likely just install Leopard until Apple sort out their buggy OS.
 
Have you tired resetting the smc like Vertigo78 seems that Snow Leopard may have caused a problem from reading the official apple forums.
 
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