Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

Have followed this thread as an early poster with the significantly decreased battery life after upgrading to Lion. I'm reporting that after upgrading to Mavericks, my battery life is now back to where it was over 2 years ago -- over 5.5 hours on a charge. While that isn't what I had when MBP was new (early 2011) ~7 hours. After Lion, and before Mavericks it was 2 hours tops.

One of the big things I think improved it was a module of Adobe CS3 and CS4. There were a couple library components that were being called at at every start-up and running in the background. Mavericks warned me about it (where Lion never did). I disabled those modules (and removed from library/prefs/adobe) and here I am with much better battery.

I hope that helps others on this thread.

Nick

hey, could you please give more specifics. i'm sure we all would love to know exctaly how did it. step by step instructions would be great. thanks

Sure - as best as I can at this point from memory.

1) Standard upgrade to Mavericks from Lion

2) At start-up (before start-up completed), warning/dialogue screen appeared. Don't remember exact wording, but it was to the effect of, "[System trying to start Adobe CS4 library services/extensions/components/preferences . . . ]" or something containing some of those words. My thought was that I didn't want the system starting any services related to apps that I wasn't using at the moment (especially not at start-up).

3) Some web searches led me to these links to disable access to CS4 service extensions

Disable access to CS4 service extensions | System administrator

4) I disabled these extensions as outlined in that article. Note, it requires accessing hidden user library files - which you can do by following instructions here: Access hidden user library files | Mac OS 10.7 and later

5) After I did this, I completed the PRAM reset, disk permissions, etc. for good measure. (It never did anything in the past)

After that point, battery life more than doubled to 5-6 hours.

I realize that might not help everyone, but hope it helps a few. If you need to run CS3/CS4 apps, this might not work.

Some additional notes:

- I now use the Adobe Creative Cloud apps. They seems to run fine (without obvious background components running - even when apps not in use).

- Adobe InDesign (CC version) is a battery hog (accoring to Mavericks reporting)

- When I try to launch any of the old CS3 or CS4 versions of Adobe apps, it wants to install a java SE 6 runtime component. (Not the case with new CC versions of the same Apps).

- I suspect the CS3/CS4 components were running the whole time under Lion. Maybe you can follow the same steps in Lion to remove (w/out upgrading to Mavericks).

Last, Mavericks now shows apps that are consuming a lot of power in the battery display (top right of screen). Click on it, and the 3rd line down will inidicate if there is an app that is consuming a lot of power. Many times, it just says, "Calculating Power Usage Information."

Nick

Let's do it. They need to change the battery. We paid too much money for us to get ignored.