Sudden Unibody Macbook battery issues.

[jetsam1]

Hi all. Brand new member and first post! So please be gentle!

I have a aluminium unibody 13" Macbook bought in autumn 2008 so just over a year old. Feel a bit sad that my first post is about a problem as I love this little computer!

Just recently I have noticed that I'm only getting 1 1/5 hours of battery life out of a full charge instead of the 3 1/2 to 4 hours I am used to. This seems a bit extreme. I was wondering whether this has been seen before. I haven't updated to Snow Leapord and have been keeping up with the official software updates as when OSX wants them.

My usage has not changed, so am at a loss as to a possible explanation. Just hoping the battery is not fried as I don't need to be spending more money right now!

Here is the battery details from the System Profiler:
Charge Information:
Charge remaining (mAh): 2543
Fully charged: No
Charging: No
Full charge capacity (mAh): 4184
Health Information:
Cycle count: 77
Condition: Good
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA): -2565
Voltage (mV): 11302
(Right now showing 59 minutes at 60% charge. Unpluggesd at 100% showing 1.5 hours)

Thanks for any advice or threads that deal with this issue!

 

[celticpride678]

Try calibrating your battery.

 

[jetsam1]

Try calibrating your battery.

Done this already, and still have this problem......

 

[fluffyx]

From those statistics, your battery doesn't seem to be the problem. Can you open Activity Monitor (from the Utilities folder), sort by the "CPU%" column so the biggest numbers are at the top, and post a screenshot here?

Most likely, an activity is taking up too much of your computer's processor power.

 

[jetsam1]

This is the Activity Monitor screenshot. This is pretty normal usage levels in terms of the programs open. One thing is that I do only have 7 GB of the hard drive left free. Can this maybe effect general operations?

This is the disk usage.

Any help is really appreciated!

 

[fluffyx]

My mistake— I left out a step. In that dropdown box in the upper-right corner of the window, choose "All Processes." Then note the processes near the top of the list.

From the processor usage graph, it does seem that a runaway process is causing the poor battery life, and once you choose "All Processes," the name of that process will be revealed.

From the screenshots, it also seems that your computer was running low on memory. If you were seeing a lot of the spinning color wheel, try quitting some apps.

P.S., do you really need iAntivirus?

 

[jetsam1]

Hi,

Just uninstalled the iAntivirus and on restart had 6 hours or so battery with no programs running! How odd.....

With Firefox and MSN, am running at between 3:30 and 4 hours battery time. How strange. I was just panicking a little that I had some major problem!

Thanks for the help!