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snow leopard - very poor battery times

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xfiendx

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 2, 2009
5
0
Macbook pro, 2.5 ghz , 4 gb ram (bought in June)

After the install of snow leopard, and a full charge. My battery at 96% showed only 2:45 hours, over the past 30 minutes with little no usage n the laptop (other than letting it sit at the office and periodicaly checking battery) I am seeing 81% charge and 2:05 on the charge.

The screen is dimmed, display sleep is set to 5 mins, computer sleep to 15....

Anyone else seeing this?

Health on my battery shows 97%, 67 cycles.
 
Are you sure it's actually the battery time and not just the indicator?

They tuned it to show more realistic and consistent numbers. In Leopard it used to jump around like crazy. On my MBP 17" I'd see 8:20, then leave the computer untouched for a while and see it go up to 10:05, then open a Safari window and start surfing and kaboom, it dropped to 3:55 or whatever. I got sick of the mad random jumping and tried using a stopwatch in Dashboard a few times. As it turned out, I landed around the same battery life every time, about 5 hours.

After upgrading to SL it's not jumping around wildly anymore. As I've been typing this post, it's been wandering within a range of 5:15 and 5:25, which actually sounds like an accurate prediction. Now I feel confident leaving the remaining time as the default battery indicator on the menu... I used to have percentage up there before, I would've preferred remaining time but the jumping was just making me nervous and distracted.
 
Anuba said:
Are you sure it's actually the battery time and not just the indicator?

They tuned it to show more realistic and consistent numbers. In Leopard it used to jump around like crazy. On my MBP 17" I'd see 8:20, then leave the computer untouched for a while and see it go up to 10:05, then open a Safari window and start surfing and kaboom, it dropped to 3:55 or whatever. I got sick of the mad random jumping and tried using a stopwatch in Dashboard a few times. As it turned out, I landed around the same battery life every time, about 5 hours.

After upgrading to SL it's not jumping around wildly anymore. As I've been typing this post, it's been wandering within a range of 5:15 and 5:25, which actually sounds like an accurate prediction. Now I feel confident leaving the remaining time as the default battery indicator on the menu... I used to have percentage up there before, I would've preferred remaining time but the jumping was just making me nervous and distracted.
Click to expand...

Down to 58% since the original post, and I've been doing is browsing. Battery shows 1:15 mins. This is definitely not right. Before I was getting 5-6 hours on a charge and that was consistent
 
OK. Any suspicious signs such as fan noise, heat, runaway CPU usage...?

It's impossible to drain the battery without something consuming that energy, so there must be something that's doing much more than it should. Whatever it is, it can't really hide from the Activity Monitor.
 
Check Activity Monitor. Sort by CPU %, highest to lowest.

Also check System Profiler (the Power section) for "Health Information" (on the battery) and "Full charge capacity".

If you could post back if there's any process (and what it/they are) constantly using more than about 10% CPU while you're not doing anything else, as well as the health information and full charge capacity of your battery it would help get to the bottom of this!
 
BTW, you wouldn't happen to be hearing a lot of hard disk chattering?

SL is running surprisingly well on my machine, but it seems to love indexing stuff... the "mds" process (which I'm guessing is a meta data snooper on Spotlight's payroll) keeps shooting to the top of the Activity Monitor's list, it's done two long passes in the last couple of hours.
 
may have found issue, sophos(my corp av) management was running at 96%! I did not think this was CPU related since system did not seem sluggish when doing other things, nor was it running hot.

Since force quitting the process, at 46% battery life I'm at 2:41, I believe this to be the issue.

Our Sophos admin did say I would not get updates until we deployed the new version, but I did not think it would cause this much of an issue.

I will definitely be talking to him about this tomorrow.
 
AV on Mac, your employer's admin sounds a little paranoid...

At my former workplace we made it through the Win98/ME/2K/XP years without AV. AV software tends to cripple performance a lot, it's just not worth the suffering to guard a Mac against a virus that never comes. Kind of like always wearing a condom inside a monastery in case one might one day accidentally walk into a nun who accidentally happened to be naked and bent over at the time.
 
Anuba said:
AV on Mac, your employer's admin sounds a little paranoid...

At my former workplace we made it through the Win98/ME/2K/XP years without AV. AV software tends to cripple performance a lot, it's just not worth the suffering to guard a Mac against a virus that never comes. Kind of like always wearing a condom inside a monastery in case one might one day accidentally walked into a nun who accidentally happened to be naked and bent over at the time.
Click to expand...

I work for my state's largest University, trust me, if a computer can get a virus, we have seen it here.

I ran Sophos on this box since June with no issues.

ETA: We require AV to get on our network.
 
Anuba said:
AV on Mac, your employer's admin sounds a little paranoid...

At my former workplace we made it through the Win98/ME/2K/XP years without AV. AV software tends to cripple performance a lot, it's just not worth the suffering to guard a Mac against a virus that never comes. Kind of like always wearing a condom inside a monastery in case one might one day accidentally walk into a nun who accidentally happened to be naked and bent over at the time.
Click to expand...

Yeah cause good lord there has never been a Virus on a Mac Before. His employer is not paranoid, but I heard his boss is a real prick.
 
tjmrpm04 said:
Yeah cause good lord there has never been a Virus on a Mac Before. His employer is not paranoid, but I heard his boss is a real prick.
Click to expand...

Holy ****! You're a freakin telepath, how'd you know my boss is a prick? ;)
 
I am having the same issues. Diminished battery life. On my computer, 2.4ghz 2gb ram, snow leopard, the fan is running CONSTANTLY. And at a high rate. I called apple and they told me that I need to take it in to be serviced. I thought maybe you all would be of more help. After reading the rest of the above posts I went to see my activity monitor. I had a LexmarkCUPS Driver taking up over 90% of CPU usage. I told the computer to quit and the fan stopped immediately. What is that? How do I get it to stop running in the future? I don't own a lexmark printer, only HP. Now the biggest usage is firefox at like 14% with "all processes" selected.
 
Problem is with Snow Leopard

I have a brand new Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard pre-installed and have the same issues with battery . You can watch time remaining jump all over the place. With full charge, am watching the time remaining go from 8.13 to 7.19 then back to 8.0, then down to 5, back up to 7 etc. I'm just watching it do this without doing anything on the machine
 
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