Q: MacBook Pro Battery 'Service Battery' after Snow Upgrade

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What's the temperature, and for what element, that you'd say constitutes overheating?

****, there are so many tips and triks to get the battery elongate forever.

Never leave the machine plugged in all the time. Laptops are meant to be portable. Using it as a desktop that never runs on the battery will destroy your battery life.
Discharge-Cycles are your friend. Never letting the battery complete a cycle will greatly diminish your run-time. Try to avoid charging the battery unless it’s drained past 30%. Any time the battery drains past 50% and charges more than 50% counts as a cycle. The farther you let it drain before the charge – the better its overall health will remain. 30 cycles in a year is not a good thing.
more at source: extend laptop battery life

Taran Singh wrote:
... there are so many tips and triks to get the battery elongate forever.

Never leave the machine plugged in all the time. Laptops are meant to be portable. Using it as a desktop that never runs on the battery will destroy your battery life.

This one is true

Discharge-Cycles are your friend. Never letting the battery complete a cycle will greatly diminish your run-time. Try to avoid charging the battery unless it’s drained past 30%.

Incorrect, Taran. With modern Lithium batteries you should avoid letting it run all the way down too often. Regular, but light use is what you need with Lithium batteries. Keeping it ranging somewhere between 40% and 100% in general gives the best lifespan.

Any time the battery drains past 50% and charges more than 50% counts as a cycle. The farther you let it drain before the charge – the better its overall health will remain.

No, a "cycle" is the equivalent of a complete discharge and recharge, not half of one. It doesn't have to be all in one go either. If you discharge your battery by 10% and recharge it 10 times then you will have completed a cycle, in just the same fashion as if you discharge it once fully and then completely re-charge it.

30 cycles in a year is not a good thing.

On that we agree.

more at source: extend laptop battery life

You'll see that the advice about Lithium batteries at the site you linked to runs quite counter to many of your own suggestions.

For more information you should also read http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1764220 and http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

You may also find http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm interesting.

Cheers

Rod

Rod, i decided to retry installing Snow Leopard after it is updated to 10.6.3. but i'd like to keep my Leopard install if my battery still shows the same signs of eating charge cycles after upgrading.

do you know if it's possible to partition my MBP's HDD to dual boot both snow leopard and leopard, and if snow leopard is good to go, then is it harmful to delete my leopard partition?

You can do this , but you need to think about a few of the implications, FtF.

You will have to re-partition the drive, which means you will initially need to defragment it if you aren't going to clone your existing drive to an external (using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner), wipe the internal, create the partitions, and then clone back.

To do the defragging and re-partitioning easily you should really think about buying a utility like iPartition from Coriolis Systems or Drive Genius from Prosoft.

Once you have created the partitions and installed the new OS one will be in a privileged location, on the outer, faster, sectors of the disc, and whichever version of the OS you install there will have a speed advantage, so whichever OS is installed in your first partition should be the main one you intend to work with. If you don't use the "clone and wipe" approach, and create a new partition with iPartition or the like, then it will be the OS that you currently have installed.

Another factor that you need to consider is that while some applications are pretty much "stand alone", many others are not. They depend on stuff stored in support files and the like in the volume level Library and System folders. So you will really need to have separate duplicated Application folders in both of the partitions. (Most documents and the like are easier to deal with because you can choose where to save them etc). This may not matter all that much while you are experimenting (beyond taking up more drive space) , but it can make life tricky when you want to put it all back together again, if you have made modifications in one place but not in the other. You could use "Migration Assistant" to bring things over from the volume that you decide to abandon before wiping it, but it still isn't a painless process.

If the OS that you choose to keep is on the inner" partition then there will also be issues about "hot zones' and "metafile data" when you get rid of the outer one, too, if you want to get good performance without , again, cloning, wiping and cloning back.

So, all in all, it is possible, but it a substantially messier process (with some risks attached) than you might imagine. At the very least you will want to have sufficient external drive space to keep back-up clones of everything on each partition and ideally need some extra software, too. If you already have such things, don't factor in any cost for your time involved in undertaking the process, and some of the theories here about battery life actually turned out to be correct, you might save yourself some unknown part of the price of a battery. If not, you would probably be spending much more than the cost of a new one in managing the process safely!

(When deciding whether to pursue such a course you might want to take into account that I installed a new battery - one of the Sony ones, - in my own 'Santa Rosa" MBP about three weeks before SL was released. The computer itself was updated to SL on the day it was released to the public, some six months ago now. The battery, after 50 odd cycles, still sits at 95% of original charge capacity after six months of Snow Leopard use. This is pretty much just where the original battery stood after six months of use under Leopard - maybe a even a little better , in fact! )

Cheers

Rod

Message was edited by: Rod Hagen

FightTheFuture wrote:
do you know if it's possible to partition my MBP's HDD to dual boot both snow leopard and leopard, and if snow leopard is good to go, then is it harmful to delete my leopard partition?

FightTheFuture,

Apple Bootcamp Assistant is designed to partition your drive without losing any data. Take a moment to peruse:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3777

Rod wrote:
You will have to re-partition the drive, which means you will initially need to defragment it if you aren't going to clone your existing drive to an external (using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner), wipe the internal, create the partitions, and then clone back.
To do the defragging and re-partitioning easily you should really think about buying a utility like iPartition from Coriolis Systems or Drive Genius from Prosoft.

Folks, please disregard any advice regarding "de-fragging" (a myth, unless you're a marketing or sales person, or if you're into religious wars).

Don

Don, you are talking through your hat.

Firstly you need contiguous free space even to create a bootcamp partition. If the drive is fragmented already the only way to obtain this is by erasing or defragmenting it. If you don't believe me, then you might like to read the paras in http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10330046-263.html dealing with the most common reasons for the failure of attempts to create bootcamp partitions. In fact it even matters where on the disc the contiguous free space happens to be! In some cases, you will see, in fact that this is one situation where even Apple recommend use of a third party defragmentation utility !

Secondly, FtF doesn't want to install Windows on this computer, he wants to install a different version of OSX. A Bootcamp partition won't suffice for this.

There are conflicting views about the significance or otherwise of fragmentation under HFS(+) within Mac partitions, but regardless of your views on such things, you will find that you are still limited to creating a partition the size of the available contiguous free space unless you first defrag it. On a drive that has been in use for a while the greatest portion of contiguous free space will not be very large. (OSX does a good job of defragmenting small files - under 20MB, but it actually does this in a manner which reduces the amount of contiguous free space).


Don't let your beliefs and prejudices about battery problems get in the way of other "advice" you give, Don. You have simply got it wrong on this one as far as partitioning goes.

Cheers

Rod

Just throwing in another complaint. I too just got the "service battery" warning. I've tried everything in the thread so far and nothing's helped. My MBP is only 2 years old (early '08 model) and I baby the freaking battery, so there's no reason it should be doing this. The message hadn't come up until just a few days ago. I've been running Snow Leopard since it came out.

I'm afraid to take it to the Apple Store because I'm almost sure they'll just say they can't fix it or charge me for a new battery (which at only two years old is ridiculous). Is Apple just going to ignore this 70+ page thread and our cries for help/acknowledgment?

Rod Hagen wrote:
Don, you are talking through your hat.
Firstly you need contiguous free space even to create a bootcamp partition. If the drive is fragmented already the only way to obtain this is by erasing or defragmenting it. If you don't believe me, then you might like to read the paras in http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10330046-263.html dealing with the most common reasons for the failure of attempts to create bootcamp partitions. In fact it even matters where on the disc the contiguous free space happens to be! In some cases, you will see, in fact that this is one situation where even Apple recommend use of a third party defragmentation utility !

Secondly, FtF doesn't want to install Windows on this computer, he wants to install a different version of OSX. A Bootcamp partition won't suffice for this.

There are conflicting views about the significance or otherwise of fragmentation under HFS(+) within Mac partitions, but regardless of your views on such things, you will find that you are still limited to creating a partition the size of the available contiguous free space unless you first defrag it. On a drive that has been in use for a while the greatest portion of contiguous free space will not be very large. (OSX does a good job of defragmenting small files - under 20MB, but it actually does this in a manner which reduces the amount of contiguous free space).


Don't let your beliefs and prejudices about battery problems get in the way of other "advice" you give, Don. You have simply got it wrong on this one as far as partitioning goes.

Cheers

Rod

Rod,

Of course what I should have typed was "Disk Utility". Shows what happens when you try to type after a long drive. Select your boot drive, resize it to make it smaller, then hit the "+" button to add a new partition.

I try not to feed the trolls...especially the "Defrag-does-your-body-good" fanatics. When you're responsible for thousands of Macs, you learn to roll your eyes when folks like you do that song and dance.

<the sound of Rod spending long hours on the Apple forum, striving for that magical 10,000 Top User level...yearning for that feeling of being needed and appreciated>

Don

Rod & Don, i appreciate any help you can give me - the idea of a dual partition boot was led to me by configuring bootcamp. knowing how messy a partitioned drive can get for booting purposes is enough to sway me from attempting it. but i will still do the test with a partition of snow leopard, monitor the battery life and if everything looks good, i'll wipe the drive clean and just install snow leopard. this will go down whenever 10.6.3 is released and i have a free weekend.

i'll let you know what i find.

thanks!

FightTheFuture wrote:
Rod & Don, i appreciate any help you can give me - the idea of a dual partition boot was led to me by configuring bootcamp. knowing how messy a partitioned drive can get for booting purposes is enough to sway me from attempting it. but i will still do the test with a partition of snow leopard, monitor the battery life and if everything looks good, i'll wipe the drive clean and just install snow leopard. this will go down whenever 10.6.3 is released and i have a free weekend.

i'll let you know what i find.

thanks!

Sorry for the incorrect link in my previous post. If you launch Disk Utility and do a search under it's Help Menu for "Creating new partitions on a disk" you'll get all the info you need to add a partition to your computer for your new Leopard install.

For the record, I manage thousands of Macs in global enterprise environments. I do this for a living (or at least I manage techs who do it). I'm not sure what Rod does (aside from spending all his time Googling for answers and typing long, winded responses, getting into arguments, annoying people, etc.).

If you're able to do a complete Time Machine backup to a drive, I would, before partitioning. There's always that risk of data loss, may as well have that full backup handy just in case.

Don

You'll find, Don, that while Disk Utility can do a non destructive re-partition these days it still runs into major problems in doing so if the disk has any substantial free space fragmentation. No problem on a nice new drive , or one being regularly "re-imaged" as part of a companies general "display process" as you seem to indicate yours are, but a major impediment if you want to do what FtF wants to do, quite apart from the problems that would occur when he wants to turn his two partitions back into one without risking losing data.

I won't argue with you about the pros and cons of defragmentation generally (there are pluses and minuses involved here, though I'm rather surprised to see you spouting the official "Macs never need defragging" spiel. I thought I was the one who was meant to be the "company boy"! ) You might want to go and suggest it over in the Aperture forum at present where many people are having very real difficulties because of fragmentation of library files , perhaps?

But this isn't a case of whether "fragmentation is good for the soul" or otherwise. It is a case of someone wanting to do something specific in which free space fragmentation, regardless of its implications in general situations, is going to make it harder than it otherwise might seem.

I'll leave your concluding banal twaddle for others to judge. Such things don't matter to me in the slightest.

Cheers

Rod

Any developer around with the last seeded 1.6.3 on a "Pre-Uniboy" Macbook Pro?

Could you give us some light? Does Apple fixes those Snow Leopard killing batteries bugs in the recent seeds?

Thank you in advance,

I would like to know this too. Let's keep this thread on topic.