Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Jimmy Kats wrote:

you are by far the luckiest person on this thread, how is it that you experience great battery life with mountain lion?

I get 5 to 6 hours on a 3 year old battery, rennyz27 is not the only one without problems.

I don't know.. I just installed the 10.8 update which was released to the public yesterday. I heard rumors that the latest update would somehow fix the battery issue.

Jimmy Kats wrote:

you are by far the luckiest person on this thread, how is it that you experience great battery life with mountain lion?

http://www.cultofmac.com/186875/os-x-10-8-1-shows-small-battery-life-improvement s-sometimes/?utm_medium=twit&utm_campaign=spread-us

Pete

the better times are for retina owners only, what about the rest of us with non-retina macbook pros!? ohh apple

Just wanted to chime in, as i have had help form this forum in the past. Have a MacPro early 2011, 16 GB RAM Lion 10.7.4

noticed heating and very short battery life as described in many posts. Fans running fast, Battery test and Genius Bar tell me battier is in great shape. Here is what i did that didnt and then did fix it:

1 tried all the controler resets lists above ... no help

2 turned off spotlight on the VM fusion directory .. this was eating a lot of CPU time as it tried to index the Windows OS files. no real difference. But a good idea to do anyway.

Then, when using Win7 under VM, the whole windows then Max side came to a screaning halt. all CPU ticks used and all memory used. Turns out our enterprise was pusing new software to windows and Enterprise McAfee was running. I blew a gaskit .. and my IS guy blocked upgrade and took off MacAfee ...

3 removal of enterprise McAfee ... PROFOUND improvement in windows performance. Some improvment in battery life.

4. Genius guy removed all unneeded start up programs ... some help

4 I noticed a program called VMSCAN.exe or somethign like that running in activity monitor. using 100% two CPUs ... googled it and it is a VMFUSION MacAfee app. then i remembered, i OKd it when i installed VMFUSION ... so i killed it .. had to go on the web to find out how .. you have to login as SU and find the uninstall program ... sorry i cant provide the link .... this was running eventhough VMFUSION was not ...

Result: Fans at 2000 all the imte. Minimal heat. battery 5.5 to 6.5 hours again !!!! have been doing fine for a week now.

Hope this helps someone ... the moral .... McAfee is really really bad. but we all know this.

tom

Well this was just posted at Macrumors.com: OS X 10.8.2 Restores Notebook Battery Life to OS X Lion Levels. Not sure if this will make a differnce but I'm about to find out.. I would have been far more excited to read "Restors Battery Life to OS X Snow Leopard" but at least we are headed in the right direction.

This looks like 10.8.2 does restore it to 10.6.8 levels, and in some cases, it's even better.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/os-x-battery-life-analysis-from-snow-leop ard-to-mountain-lion

Has anybody updated to the latest mountain lion to verify these results?

Probably.

Pete

Jimmy Kats wrote:

Has anybody updated to the latest mountain lion to verify these results?

Yes I have and am happy to report that my battery life is as it was before, excellent.

Has anyone updated to the 10.7.5?

Does it improve the battery life?

I have, I have to say that I have seen battery life improvement since Mountain Lion.

I have just put a call into apple and had a conversation with them ...

They basically got me to use ctrl alt shift & power as everyone suggests on google for 5 seconds ...

he went on to say that there is no physical way to know this has done anything and said something about the LED's now work (they were working to begin with?)

he also said it is normal for it to reach a max of 98% charge and that is above the average for the age.

he said over time that will drop until it wont charge at all and at that point I could either replace the battery in the apple store or myself although he didnt recommend I did it myself ...

The average life according to them is 1000 cycles mine is at just over 600 ...

So from what he is saying it is software that determines the service indicator and max charge as he was saying it restricts the charge to preserve the life of the battery ...

Again this only started once I had updated to Mountain Lion ...

Was wondering, on my computer CPU use is contributing almost half to "printtool"... I do not have my printer plugged in nor am I running any programs related to my printer. I tried quitting and force quitting this, only to have it pop right back up and maintain its CPU usage. Any thoughts?

* I am running a 2009 MBP unibody with 4GB upgraded DDR3 RAM. And I am sitting on a "service battery" notification.

I just upgraded to 10.7.5 ... my battery life is now dire. Gives me 'Service Battery' message and capacity is down to 427mAh from 6900mAh.

I've tried the SMC reset to no avail. I noticed that within an hour or so of updating, my magconnector light went orange while my MBP (15" early 2011) was plugged in - so something isn't right.

I have 27 minutes from 'full charge' to power off

CoconutBattery reports power usage as 14.9 Watts

Andy