Macbook pro (Early 2011) battery.

staying off topic a moment longer

>> A lot of squinting because I can't be bothered to enlarge every single email that comes in, instead of one setting to enlarge all, but most are unreadable

do the font settings in Mail-Preferences-Fonts & Colors not work, or do you mean webmail ?

They do work, but that's for my outgoing right? I'm using the Mac mail prog.

Loads of emails come in and I have to enlarge when they do

Hi Zaccaz

My first Macbook pro had a battery life of 5-6 hours. Apple said that the battery could do 5 hours with a full charge.

The Macbook pro that i use now (2007 version) had a worse battery life so I think that every battery is different, event with the same Macbook pro.

greets

message font affects plaint text received mail too. html is harder, but there's a preference accessible through Terminal or several 3rd party apps like Tinker tool or using the prefpane from secrets.blacktree.com to name a couple.

If using Terminal, quit mail & paste this in, then press enter - adjust 13 up or down if you find that's not useful.

defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 13

Try this:

Go to Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder in Applications), and see if there is something taking up tons of CPU. I checked, and there was some plugin taking up an entire core of my processor, and therefore sucking the life out of my computer. If you select the thing taking up so much power, and click "Stop" or "Quit" or something, it will stop, and your battery life will jump up. If not, try resetting the SMC by turning off the computer, holding the left Command, Option, and Shift keys down, as well as the power button for 5 seconds, and then push the power button again. If that doesn't work. go to the Apple Store.

Thanks Andy, I'll give that a go!! I very rarely receive plain text mails. Not used terminal yet, but will give that a go

I was having issues very similar to others I see here. This may not be your issue, but mine turned out to be related to a glitch in Parallels, a virtual machine app that lets you run XP sessions within Mac OS.

If you are using Parallels and having battery problems, check this link for more info to see if this could be your problem.

Thanks for the info Mark, I reloaded Parallels on top of itself and my Dock process went from 200.00 to .6 The dock process was running the CPU at 25% all the time.

Thanks for the info Mark. This resolved my MBP 13inch (early 2011) battery issue! Many thanks.

Just removed an older Parallels (a beta build of 3.0), though that page only noted 6.0 being a problem, so who knows if this will help me... was worth the shot, so thanks for the tip!

Hello all,

Bought a refurbished Macbook Pro in November 2011 (early 2011 13" model) I have only had this machine for a few months, but its battery life seems to have reduced subtantially in that time.

According to my full system report, even though my battery has only done 24 cycles, its full charge capacity is 5714 and the system report considers this "normal". Is it normal? I think in the first few weeks of using the MBP its full capacity was between 6000-7000, because I remember being surprised by how high it was. So, likewise,I am very surprised that battery life has dropped from "good" in what must be only a matter of weeks. I have also noticed that the battery now takes only short amount of time (about 2 hours) to charge when the machine is off.

I'm a bit confused as to whether these new "all in one" battery models have to be calibrated because I notice you can't run the battery down to nothing for the computer to go to sleep, connect to power and then wake it up, because it turns itself off.

I have only done one full "calibration" since having the machine, but I regularly run the battery down very low (around 5%) before connecting power, so I am unsure as to why the battery life should drop so suddenly when I am telling the battery what is "empty" on a regular basis, as opposed to half using it on battery and then charging it.

I'm just recharging from empty as we speak and the battery says it's 75% full, 40 mins to full charge.

I'd be interested to know if this is normal and I'm just being overly concerned, or if my battery is actually playing up, especially as the machine's still within warranty.

I don't ever use the display on full bightness as I suffer from visual stress, and I use GlimmerBlocker when I'm surfing the web so that should reduce the amount of power consumed with things like Java surely? I always have bluetooth off.

Would be grateful for your feedback.

Thanks

H_K

Well, I think your battery is losing power a bit faster than it should. I am up to 85 cycles (and at 93% "health"), with the capacity down to 6449 mAh (out of a designed 6900 mAh). This is according to iStat Menu, so I can't say this is 100% accurate for sure, but seems about right.

I will say that my battery life has generally been pretty good lately, but when running Firefox or Chrome (or Twitter, for that matter), it switches to the dedicated video card and that seems to use up juice faster than anything else. Keeping it on integrated really extends me to anywhere from 4 to 6 hours, which I'm quite happy with. I've tried running those apps with the integrated forced as the selection and haven't noticed too many problems, but occasionally they do get "stuck" - just shocking that an app like Twitter would need so much processing power when even Safari would not!!

gareth26 wrote:

I bought the base model 13" a few days ago, very unimpressed with the battery life, was fully charged an hour ago, only been surfing the web and listening to itunes and now its at 82%!! back lit off blue tooth off. dont have flash installed but do use youtube with google chrome. brightness just below half way, first ever laptop as been used to imac so not sure what to make of all this

8% consumption per hour equals 10 hours or more runtime, I would 't complain about that.

Hmm. That's interesting. I don't use Google Chrome but I do regularly visit Twitter (not via an app though-are we talking about the same thing) Is there any way of adjusting settings to allow access to the other graphics card? I had no idea they switched like that, that's all pretty new to me.

Meantime, Apple've booked me in at the local Genius bar later in the week to take a look at the battery (does seem rather odd to have dropped so quick) just in case. Hope I can get it resolved. It's not a major gripe, just a disappointment and an inconvenience (don't want to have to suddenly find after my warranty's run out that the battery was actually faulty to begin with and I need to replace it (if you see what I mean) Especially given my folks have an ordinary macbook that's several years old that has done nearly 600 cycles and still has a full capacity of 4942!!!! (Wow!)

Sorry, I was referring to the actual Twitter app - the website renders like any other website. however, Chrome likes using the discrete graphics chip, as does Firefox, so any time spent with those open means you are burning through battery life just to browse the web - and i've found that both will work just fine on integrated graphics.

You can use an app called gfxcardstatus, which will install into your menu bar and let you know what graphics card you're using, what apps are requiring it, and also lets you force it to pick the integrated all the time (or only when on battery, etc). You can download it here: http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus