Tiger and PowerBook battery

[peter_smith]

Installed Tiger on newish 15" Powerbook.

Suddenly I've noticed battery life on full charge is announced (seemingly correctly) at 1'40" -- were previously I'd been getting more like 2'40".

If, in Terminal, I go
ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo
I get Capacity = 4221 (as against AbsoluteMaxCapacity = 4400) so that looks OK. But I do get a huge 21 digit number for Amperage which doesn't look so OK.

Is this a Tiger problem reducing battery life; or is it sheer coincidence I first noticed this sudden drop after installation???

 

[GoldenHoya]

I've actually noticed the opposite. I got tiger about a week ago and installed it on my month old 15" pb. I have noticed a longer battery life, but I couldn't give you any specifics. How old is your machine?

 

[nbs2]

I've noticed the same thing as Peter. I'm running on a 1.25 15". I should mention that I have been running it with the replacement battery that I was sent. Oh yeah - it's just over a year old.

 

[peter_smith]

More details

To be precise: 1.5GHz PowerBook, latest series (dispatched 2nd Feb)

 

[peter_smith]

Virex is the culprit!!!!

Just thought to check the Activity monitor. 100% of CPU was being used --- the culprit was somethng called VShieldCheck [or something like that], hogging about 90%. Quitting the process, the CPU monitor fell right back to a few percent for the system.

Removing Virex from start-up items meant, on restart, CPU levels were back to normal. And battery predictions also back to normal.

So kill Virex!

 

[Guntis]

Virex is not for Tiger

I read somewhere that Virex is no longer offered for .Mac users who have Tiger. So apparently Tiger users shouldn't bother themselves with this crap...

 

[peter_smith]

Agreed, but ...

Sure ... Virex is incompatible, as I've now discovered the hard way!

However, it is a bit naughty that the installer for Tiger left it, without warning, in the startup items when there are known problems!

 

[SuperChuck]

I was told that battery perf gets worse in Tiger in certain situations, due to the fact that Spotlight is perpetually indexing. I dunno how true it is, just what I heard from a friend.

 

[StarbucksSam]

You ought to recalibrate your battery. To do this, you must charge it ALL THE WAY UP and then ALL THE WAY DOWN.

I did this last night b/c I just got my PowerBook. You charge it until it's green, and then you use as much of the battery as possible (turn on high performance and stuff... screen brightness... and use iTunes with the volume up) and you'll be done in two hours. When it is done, it will EVENTUALLY fall asleep. At that point, you're recalibrated, and you can just plug back in and get back to work.