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Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

After upgrading to Lion, my MacBook Pro battery life has been severly affected. After 1.5 hours of light web browsing, my battery has decreased to 40% from 100% after charging all night.


Notes: Spotlight completed indexing the hard drive over night, and the laptop remained plugged in charging. The fans seem to be running normally, not at a higher rate. The backlight is at 50% brightness.


Thoughts?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7), 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB Ram

Posted on Jul 21, 2011 7:02 AM

Reply
2,644 replies

Apr 17, 2012 12:03 PM in response to Rayced

Precog's the name. "precock" sounds like something right out of an adult movie. For very adult adults.


As for Spotlight, beware beware. When it is hellbent on mapping out the entire volume, disk I/O goes thru the roof and the battery down the drain. In former days, it was useful to purge the index every now and then and force a rebuild, since it tended to get konfuzzed after awhile, which in turn triggered yet more useless searches. Haven't cohabited with Lion long enough to know if it has been cured of those ills.

Apr 17, 2012 12:10 PM in response to wayne111

wayne111 wrote:


As for the earlier question, the virus software is Sophos and I just had to disable the on-access scanning. I hadn't been carefully paying attention, but on-access scanning made spotlight indexing take something on the order of 30 hours. I disabled on-access scanning and rebooted. Spotlight then finished indexing in about 5 hours. I still might have trouble hitting 7 hours of battery doing wireless browsing and other light tasks. I haven't had the chance to test directly, but with screen at half brightness I could probably get about 5 hours under such light use.


Thanks for the info, Wayne. I run Sophos, too, so I'll check out my settings and see if there's an improvement (which would be **** nice at this stage!).


And for whoever may care, I'm not new to Mac, either, but these days, it's not nearly as safe to go without AV as it used to be, especially after the Flashback nonsense.

Apr 17, 2012 12:17 PM in response to alto2

alto2 wrote:


And for whoever may care, I'm not new to Mac, either, but these days, it's not nearly as safe to go without AV as it used to be, especially after the Flashback nonsense.



Well it seems that some Mac users from 1984 are still stuck at 1984… Nowadays I'd give more credit to someone who's using *NIX system since 1984 than who still have "Classic" in his head…

Apr 17, 2012 12:22 PM in response to Courcoul

Courcoul wrote:


Precog's the name. "precock" sounds like something right out of an adult movie. For very adult adults.


As for Spotlight, beware beware. When it is hellbent on mapping out the entire volume, disk I/O goes thru the roof and the battery down the drain. In former days, it was useful to purge the index every now and then and force a rebuild, since it tended to get konfuzzed after awhile, which in turn triggered yet more useless searches. Haven't cohabited with Lion long enough to know if it has been cured of those ills.


Ok I've done a spelling mistake. Shoot me.


In former days I never had the necessity to purge spotlight index since it was introduced with Tiger.

It had never gave me any problem.


With Lion it's always happening after reparing permissions from the Recovery Partition using the resetpassword tool.

Apr 18, 2012 2:24 AM in response to petermac87

And I have my opinion. And Yes, Apple has become one of the biggest companies on the planet and so many more people have been buying them. Maybe you could suggest to them to downgrade the company? Your days of using one as a status symbol are over, especially with the iPad being one of the most purchased and 'must have' items on the planet.


Times change my friend. Some people will have problems, most won't.


Pete


Oh here it is… You're such a modern age philosopher. Or a Guru?

Apr 18, 2012 3:10 AM in response to petermac87

You're welcome! It's always a pleasure to quote such pearls of wisdom, or pearls before swine if you'd rather.

Either cases, I don't think that's what really matters.


What matters is that you're the only one here claiming a 7 hours battery life on your laptop with Lion, while us "swine" are still struggling to get 5. Even after clean installs, SMC resets and so on.


So what's the secret of your success? Perhaps bragging around a bunch of lies and then accuse people who are spoiling 'em of being trolls?


Oh I'm sorry I forgot to mention your menthor Csound1 who claims to have deploied several Lion installs on its several laptops withouth experiencing any battery drain. He told us that he has built up the "perfect" Lion install, which seems that doesn't move an inch from what he has setup. Probably they just stay off, that is why their system never changes and their batteries are lasting so long.

Apr 18, 2012 3:17 AM in response to Rayced

Do you actually read or spellcheck what you write? What is a menthor and how come so many others here lately are reporting a sudden improvement in battery life. Seems a matter in your case of a poor workman always blames........ etc.


Anyhow since this is the only thread you rant in, I also am out of it like the others.


Your friend


Pete

Apr 18, 2012 3:25 AM in response to petermac87

petermac87 wrote:


Do you actually read or spellcheck what you write? What is a menthor and how come so many others here lately are reporting a sudden improvement in battery life. Seems a matter in your case of a poor workman always blames........ etc.


Anyhow since this is the only thread you rant in, I also am out of it like the others.


Your friend


Pete


How many other languages do you speak beside just your native one?


I'm not blaming, you're the one not able to give a solution to this issue. Where are all these guys reporting an improvment in their battery life? There are just a couple of them who have actually removed some daemons/agents/services many others havent ever installed on their systems but are still experiencing battery drain issue.


I guess you leave cause you cannot provide any solution to the issue. No points to gather here right?

It's not gonna be such a bad loss.


Bye.

Apr 18, 2012 4:09 AM in response to Rayced

Rayced wrote:


petermac87 wrote:


Yes happens every time that rayced gets day leave. His only supporters have even deserted him here. This thread is of little value to most people anymore. Thanks rayced.


Pete


And your solution for the battery drain issue is?


No points today? Mhhh how sad for you…

You've been a member for 6 years, you have 5 points, we can all see how useful you've been sheep farmer.

Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

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