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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

Aug 12, 2011 11:19 AM in response to Michael Empric

My MBP was running hot, and if not plugged in I guess the battery life would be reduced from normal.


So I looked for processes using CPU. SystemUIServer stood out at about 14%.


So I killed it. It restarted and is now less than 1%, which is in line with my SL Mac.


The MBP is now running cool.


I apologize if someone else has posted this workaround, but I didn't want to plow through 24 pages of posts

Aug 12, 2011 11:43 AM in response to shiriajin

Hehe yeah, a lot of people are reporting that they did something to 'fix' it, i.e. uninstalling some software or disabling some services or even reinstalling their whole OS- and battery life has jumped to 10+ hours.


Hate to break it to the dreamers, but NO mac portable lasts that long. Even two-bit netbooks don't last that long. It's just another manifestation of the same bug, in the opposite direction. I don't know if this is better or worse; on the one hand you probably won't 'run out' of power after 2 hours, but on the other hand it might not realize it's running dry when it actually is, and it'll just turn off with no warning when that happens. That could be really bad.

Aug 12, 2011 3:17 PM in response to Michael Empric

Is there a way i can go bacl to SL and later install Lion. I downloaded lion from App Store and updated SL. I don't have a lion on a disk. If i go back to SL will I have to buy lion again.


Help on:

1) How to go back to SL?

2) Lion on app. store?can i make a bootable disk now?


I am fed up of the battery drainage. It has come down by 50-60%. I have few tricks as mentioned here, but of no avail. Some help here!! ONe big reason i like apple is that it used to give 7-8 hours of battery life., now its less than 5 hours on good days..!! arghh...


TIA

Aug 12, 2011 5:34 PM in response to guru_pinu

You can do a fresh installation of SL by using the CDs that came with your MacBook.

As for Lion, you don't have to buy it again but if you go to SL, you will have to download it again. If you have saved the lion installation file, here is what you can do:

Locate the OS X Lion installer and right-click on it. Select 'Show Package Contents'.

- Inside the 'Contents' folder, there is a 'SharedSupport' folder. Inside that is the Lion Installer. It's called 'InstallESD.dmg".

- Copy 'InstallESD.dmg' to the Desktop by clicking and dragging it while holding down the Option-key. You should see a little green plus icon if you did it right.

- Open Disk Utility. Head to the Go menu in the Finder and select 'Utilities'. Disk Utility should be in there.

- Click the burn button.

- Select 'InstallESD.dmg' from the Desktop, insert a blank 4.7GB DVD and wait. Once it's finished, you'll have a shiny new Lion install DVD.

You can now install Lion on whatever machines you like, just as if you'd purchased the install disc from your local Apple Store. Lion is expected to launch on the Mac App Store this week.

Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

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