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My Palm's battery life is horrible?

Macbook pro battery life

  • My macbook pro battery life is awful, and it shouldn't be. What can I do about that? My early 2011 15-inch macbook pro has 86% of its original battery capacity after 607 loadcycles, but my battery life is really bad. I've lost about 30% of my battery in the last 40 minutes, and it regularly goes from full to dead in two hours or so. As far as my typical use habits, I try not to be running anything too crazy in the background, but I don't remember to (and don't really want to) quit skype/im/evernote/dropbox type apps running in the background that may have an impact. I always have chrome open and I have a nasty habit of keeping a ton of tabs open, which I think it pretty memory intensive - is that something that's likely to have a big impact on my battery? General use is heavy, I don't even want to count the number of hours a day I'm on the thing but it's way too high. On a normal day, I would have, say, word, chrome, excel, and maybe spotify in use, and skype, evernote, and dropbox open in the background. I may also have other apps (like a tab or two in firefox, or mendeley, or some files in preview) open - is that an issue and something I should think about? I don't torrent, or anything like that that I would expect to be memory-intensive. I always keep my screen brightness as low as I can tolerate (usually around 40%) and the keyboard lights off. Bluetooth is off. I turn wifi off if I don't need it. Nothing I do seems that unusual, but I think my battery life is. I just ran a virus scan with sophos and it didn't find anything. What are high-impact, reasonably easy things to do that are likely to increase my battery life? Is there anything I can do? Should I look at replacing my battery? I don't expect 12 hour battery life, but more than two would be nice. (apologies if I missed previous questions - there were a lot of related but unhelpful in this case questions on the green to sort though)

  • Answer:

    There are basically three things that affect battery use of a laptop computer. Number of apps open isn't one of them. They are: 1) CPU usage: the more active the CPU is, the more power you're using (If you're playing video games, you can group GPU usage in with this as well). Idle apps in the background don't use any noticeable amount unless something is wrong. 2) Screen brightness. Lighting up that big panel takes a lot of electricity. Turn down the brightness and you'll get better battery life. 3) Radio usage. Do you have wi-fi and bluetooth always turned on? Operating these radios takes up electricity. Seeing as you aren't really doing any of these things, my first guess is that your battery is just going bad. Get a new one. They fail fairly often.

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Your problem is almost certainly chrome and all those browser tabs. Upgrade to Mavericks and switch to Safari. Web pages these days tend to run a lot of JavaScript and flash, whether they are visible, or not. Safari on Mavericks has optimizations specifically designed to cut power consumption by background tabs. Mavericks has other power consumption optimizations as well.

Good Brain

Chrome has always been a massive memory and power suck for me. It might run Flash in the background just for fun, not sure. But it is consistently a high-CPU-bad-actor on any Mac I am unfortunate to run it on. Switching to an alternative browser may help — certainly, switching to Safari on Mavericks will help.

Blazecock Pileon

Update: not sure if this is a specific to me problem or a general problem with the app, but quitting spotify (even when I wasn't actively using it) doubled by battery life on its own. I guess I almost always have it running, so I learned about that. I've also been quitting chrome when I'm not using it, and those two things seems to have put me much closer to the range of "typical" battery life.

R a c h e l

What do they say about this at the Genius Counter? Personally, if I'm home, I'm plugged in. If I'm anywhere a plug is, I'm plugged in. Battery is for when there's no outlet.

Ruthless Bunny

I agree, sounds like a bad battery. Just wanted to add to tylerkaraszewski's list: DVD/CD player can also suck down battery. There is a tool on your Mac called Activity Monitor that can let you know what, if anything, is using a lot of CPU. Does your battery actually die when it's tun down? I ask because an alternate possibility is that the meter is off and the battery is poozly but okay. http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html. Only thing I didn't see already mentioned here: temperature. Too cold or too hot are not great for your battery.

jessamyn

What OS are you running? If you upgrade to Mavericks (free), there are additional OS-level utilities for preserving CPU cycles and RAM for active programs. I think it would help, but more likely, a battery replacement would help much more. Do you run on battery when you could be plugged in (e.g., at home)? Extra unnecessary cycles will make the battery wear out faster. I was also going to link to Apple's page of best practices.

supercres

I have the same computer (Early 2011 15 in macbook pro), and had the same problem. Two hour battery life basically no matter what, and also the thing was basically always HOT. I took it in to the genius bar, and the next day had a new logic board and 3x battery life. It had something to do with a wonky graphics card. YMMV.

rockindata

Personally I'd take it to the genius bar first and see if they can find anything. But unfortunately, batteries wear out and have to be replaced much sooner than the actual computer. I think I replaced mine around 3 years.

radioamy

Something else that helps is installing a flash blocker app. Flash just drains batteries. Also, I didn't know this, but my battery was shot. I took my Macbook Pro to the store for other issues, and he said my battery was shot. They put a new one in for free (under Applecare), but I think it only would've cost $70 or something.

kbennett289

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