I bought my 17 inch MBP in January as my first Mac. I know marketing numbers are usually determined under special conditions and won't translate to real world use. Along with the 17 inch, I got a 13 inch MBP for my wife. I noticed my battery life was about 4 hours maybe, surfing the web with the screen brightness turned down to about 1/3. Google searches turned up better battery life numbers. I also noticed the bottom of my MBP was getting hotter than my wife's 13 inch MBP. I had calibrated the batter twice since Jan so I did not think that was the problem. I made sure the graphic auto-switching was enabled and made sure the rest of the energy saver settings were set to default. Yesterday I spoke to the Apple guy in Best Buy. He suggested calling Applecare and doing a calibration again. while reading Apple's site about calibration, I found the SMC reset instructions. After deciding it should not hurt anything, I did the reset before the battery calibration process.
It's now running cooler, and the battery is lasting a lot longer. Right now the toolbar indicator says I have 9hours left as I type this. The highest I have ever seen it before was 5 hours.
My theory is that the graphics adapter was stuck in high performance mode and the reset somehow fixed that. It's running cooler and istat is reporting cooler temps also. The CPU ran in the mid-high 40's. It's now in the high 30's!
Much better!!
wayne
It's now running cooler, and the battery is lasting a lot longer. Right now the toolbar indicator says I have 9hours left as I type this. The highest I have ever seen it before was 5 hours.
My theory is that the graphics adapter was stuck in high performance mode and the reset somehow fixed that. It's running cooler and istat is reporting cooler temps also. The CPU ran in the mid-high 40's. It's now in the high 30's!
Much better!!
wayne
