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Anyone experiencing low batter life on MBP after Lion

Hello,


I have just upgraded to Lion and my battery life on my MBP just got cut down in half. I have this problem with previous update and found out it was due to a conflict with parallels that caused it, when it previously happened the CPU usage was high but now it is not the case and CPU %idle is 85% or higher. Although the MBP seems a bit worrmer than usual.


I use the utility app from mac "Activity Monitor" to view the CPU usage.


If any has a solution kindly do tell.


Thank you,

Khal

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 20, 2011 3:00 PM

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Posted on Jul 20, 2011 3:05 PM

http://www.apple.com/batteries/ explains how to optimize your battery life. Now don't forget, the battery life as indicated by the menubar is NOT an actual representation. Only by taking a stopwatch doing exactly the same tasks can you tell if the before and after are really different. At the start of running any new Apple releases since 10.4, Spotlight reindexes your hard drive. This can eat a lot of battery life initially. Once Spotlight menu no longer says it is indexing, that's when you need to start measuring things. Furthermore if you are using auto-save, or Time Machine, the background backing up can eat up battery life as well. So be sure you are comparing Apples to Apples when measuring your battery life.

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Jul 20, 2011 3:05 PM in response to KFAMAS

http://www.apple.com/batteries/ explains how to optimize your battery life. Now don't forget, the battery life as indicated by the menubar is NOT an actual representation. Only by taking a stopwatch doing exactly the same tasks can you tell if the before and after are really different. At the start of running any new Apple releases since 10.4, Spotlight reindexes your hard drive. This can eat a lot of battery life initially. Once Spotlight menu no longer says it is indexing, that's when you need to start measuring things. Furthermore if you are using auto-save, or Time Machine, the background backing up can eat up battery life as well. So be sure you are comparing Apples to Apples when measuring your battery life.

Jul 20, 2011 3:22 PM in response to a brody

I would agree with you if the discrepincy was small then I would really need a stopwatch, but what I am observing is going down from ~5hr to ~2.5hr after an upgrade. As I have stated I had the same issue with the prior upgrade and found out that it is linked to Parallels. I am unsure how to follow and apples to apples comparencon when it is comparing Snow Lepard to Lion, other than what I have sated.


Many thanks for your prompt reply

Jul 20, 2011 9:15 PM in response to a brody

I think it is funny how people will talk around this. Your statement was very clear. Your battery life has gone down since your upgrade to lion. It's not within the realm of normality, it has gone down considerably. Mine has too. It has gone down like a sweet muffin. I am getting about 60% of the battery life I had 2 days ago. Now, at very first it was really bad, but that was the indexing. Now though, even idle, the battery just drops and drops. I hope this isnt just how it is, I like the throught of having lion, but will switch back if I continue to get robbed of my battery life.

Jul 21, 2011 6:25 AM in response to a brody

Brody, Thank you for your reply at this point I have had 31 cycles as for resetting PRAM or SMU I dont know how to do that.


I would like to report that better levels have increased now to 4hr but I really have not done anything to the laptop of note other than normal use, didn't change anything with regards to the system I am aware of.

Jul 22, 2011 6:51 AM in response to FlatlanderIA

And does the stopwatch verify these times before the low battery warning, or not? If it does, then you might want to change your Energy Saver settings to optimize its use, and lower the brightness. One thing to remember about Lion it has many more background processes, including the Launcher, Grand Central, and Autosave/backup recovery partition. How these figure into the overall hard drive usage, and spending of battery time is something I don't know, but because they require accessing the hard drive more, that could be the source. You might want to ask on the Lion forum if anyone has found ways of turning these features off, if you don't use them. Note most third party applications don't yet have Autosave support.

Jul 22, 2011 10:09 AM in response to KFAMAS

I am having the same decreased battery issues, approximately 50% less than what has been normal for me under SL with my MBP early 2011 13' 2.3GHz C2D, 4 GB RAM. I posted the following in a different thread:


Day two after installing Lion: I have my MBP sitting in front of me open. Started off with 3:57 battery time (low for just waking from sleep after charged overnight). Only Safari and Speed Download were the open apps and I wasn't using them - just desktop screen showing. In twenty minutes went to 2:01 remaining. Opened Activity Monitor and the only significant process shown is kernel_task at 22% and mds which ranges 0 to 88%. Don't understand enough to know what that means except to share it so help can come from Apple for a fix!


I did calibrate the battery yesterday. I did not reset PRAM or SMU, and I have the latest firmware update I did under SL.

Jul 22, 2011 10:53 AM in response to KeanuReeves

Well your situation is different. Sounds like you need your hardware looked at. If an erase and install does not resolve a hardware issue, and you've timed it to be exactly 2 hours under what Apple's website considers normal use for the tasks you are doing, you may have a hardware issue. Note, if you aren't timing it, the menubar measurement is INACCURATE! Do not take it as gospel.

Anyone experiencing low batter life on MBP after Lion

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