Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life

I did the reinstall of SL and my battery life dropped AGAIN now to only 2 hours :( I'm going to demand a new computer this is BS apple! So I restored Lion, figured I might as well get to use iCloud if I'm going to have a ****** battery life anyway. I did this sign in process but I was already signed in and it did nothing for me. I give up.

@magicchik , you must have something else going on. When most of the people on this forum reverted back to SL, their battery life went back to normal. My sign in process was for them. Sorry for your troubles. You should definitely take your mbp back to the Apple store and demand a replacement.

@sssenator Using your trick, the battery did show 8 h, doing nothing at all, but as soon as i open safari, just waiting at top site window, the battery drop to 3 h 35, then goes up to 6 h 56. If i browse and open tab, the battery then drop again. I mean, huge drop. The estimated time is going crazy. I dont think the trick fix anything.

@magicchik , you must have something else going on. When most of the people on this forum reverted back to SL, their battery life went back to normal. My sign in process was for them. Sorry for your troubles. You should definitely take your mbp back to the Apple store and demand a replacement.

Good advice, but when you get a replacement ask for a pre-Lion MBP, one with SL still native-installed. There are issues trying to restore SL to a machine that's been Lionized.  If you have to, go to an Apple-certified reseller with older machines still in inventory, or buy a used one in good condition that still has SL.  Unless you wipe the drive clean and start fresh, there are Lion artifacts that if left on your machine will defeat a proper reinstall of SL. 

After Lion chomped my MBAir and Apple replaced the logic board and SSD (no questions asked), I spent half a day purging Lion and reinstalling SL -- in part because I wasn't fully prepared and had to improvise along the way.  Afterward, my machine worked fine and its battery life has been normal.  It was a learning experience with a positive outcome, but you have better things to do with your time.  Better to start with SL on board if you can find it.

BTW, a CNET article from last week, talking about other problems associated with Lion, validated this advice: that if you're restoring SL, you must scrub Lion completely and then reinstall from a proper SL startup disk or an SL stick (Airs come with sticks); otherwise, you'll have residual problems. 

It goes without saying that before you delete anything on your machine, first make a complete backup of the rest of your data using Time Machine, a second MB, or other external media.  You can the use the time while you wait for SL to reinstall to delete digital deadwood, always a good feeling.

Hey, MM, I just noticed that your avatar identifies you as an iPhone user.  No wonder you love Lion.  It's the anti-Mac. No problem, enjoy your calling and Angry Birds.

can someone please explain to me how to do a "clean install" of sl using my time machine backup and /or my sl startup disk because when I inserted my disk and plugged my time machine backup in and re installed sl that way, it dit cleared my hard drive and re installed but battery life was still low even though battery status is normal. I don't really know much about computers or computer lingo and I'm just trying to read and learn and find any solution. So now I have lion restored from time machine with 4 hours battery life and won't be able to get to an apple store until april. Suggestions? I don't want to do any more damage to my computer.

sssenator wrote:

 

So, I can confirm it for myself. doing these following steps improved my battery to what it was on SL. Or almost anyway.

 

1. Turn on your MBP. Let it boot to your desktop.

2. On the menu bar at the top right corner of the desktop, click on your name/username that you set up.

3. Then click on "Login Window..."

4. You should get an animation of the desktop flipping over like a box to the login screen and then the prompt to sign in.

5. Sign in!

 

It seems to work for me, amazing!! Wi-Fi, Brightness at 75%, Safari, Preview, iTunes playing with volume at 75%, MS Word, Mactracker, coconutBattery; it shows 6:55 left! When I don't move cursors, or typing I get almost 7:30!! By the way, I just noticed that my power usage is at 9 -9.5 Watt, which is very good news. (It was practically never below 11 until today)

Of course I have the Flash plug-ins desactivated and no external HD connected, but that's ok for me. (When plugging the HD, the power rises instantly to 16 Watt and battery indication drops to 3:00 -3:30)

First indications are very encouraging, let's see if I'll really get my 6 hours now. Thanks anyway!

can someone please explain to me how to do a "clean install" of sl using my time machine backup and /or my sl startup disk because when I inserted my disk and plugged my time machine backup in and re installed sl that way, it dit cleared my hard drive and re installed but battery life was still low even though battery status is normal. I don't really know much about computers or computer lingo and I'm just trying to read and learn and find any solution. So now I have lion restored from time machine with 4 hours battery life and won't be able to get to an apple store until april. Suggestions? I don't want to do any more damage to my computer.

It's not clear from your earlier post whether you used an installation disk to install Snow Leopard, or whether you installed it from Time Machine.  If from TM, it may not be a clean installation.  Only use the installation disk or stick, to erase Lion using Disk Utility and to reinstall or install Snow Leiopard. The disk or stick will have an Options button that will enable you to clean the hard drive.  You can see examples of this on YouTube.  See which of these is easiest to watch and understand:

http://tinyurl.com/youtube-lionoff-snowon

Yours is a new machine, so it should be covered by Apple's warranty.  I would find a nearby Apple store or Apple-certified reseller -- they're all over the world -- or a local Apple users club (they're even more prolific, every college has one) and have someone walk you through installation of Snow Leopard.

The most certain solution would be to get a new machine with Snow Leopard installed -- somewhere other than at an Apple Store, Apple stores are pushing Lion -- or a used one with Snow Leopard installed, from a private party. 

There's no guarantee that any solution posted here will work to solve a battery problem.  Every machine is unique and to a certain extent, the uses to which the machine is put are unique, too, which means a lot of variation.  That's why we depend on our OSs being sufficiently comprehensive to make things work regardless.

sssenator wrote:

 

So, I can confirm it for myself. doing these following steps improved my battery to what it was on SL. Or almost anyway.

 

1. Turn on your MBP. Let it boot to your desktop.

2. On the menu bar at the top right corner of the desktop, click on your name/username that you set up.

3. Then click on "Login Window..."

4. You should get an animation of the desktop flipping over like a box to the login screen and then the prompt to sign in.

5. Sign in!

for me it's same time, all i think about this, that when you lock your screen lion start save energy and when you enter again some way a triger of normal energy useage not work, it's only what i think

guys try to run vmware or someting like this and say if youn notece diffrence aboute performance or if life battery after hard work still can back to high time

ok sorry, yeah this is confusing me so much...anyway, what I did first was boot from my start up disk, use DU to create the partition on my hardrive (because that was the only way the start up disk would work) and then i restarted my computer completely wiped clean with snow leopard as the new OS. Then I plugged my time machine in, booted from that with the start up disk still inside, selected utilities and restored my computer to the earliest date I had with SL. i restarted and i now had all my files and a SL OS. However, this put my battery life at 2 hours! and when it said charged, i unplugged and it immediately said 94% and just went down from there. So being as frustrated as i was, I booted once again from my TM this time removing the SL disk and retored my computer yet again, but this time to my latest backup with Lion installed and now I am back to 3-4 hours battery life. Square one for me.

oh and Bob I live in Guam and I promise you there is nobody here that knows a thing about Mac...especially reguarding this issue. So I'm currently relying on phone support and discussion support

Yesterday's tests results:

After following the advice of sssenator, I got 5+ hours of Real Life Battery with my Lion SSD.

Then I put back my HD with SL installed and got slightly better reasults.

So there's clearly something to be fixed by Apple, but I won't get back to SL for one hour or so of difference (say the battery saving if I install SL to SSD). Besides, save Spaces, I love Lion!

Bob I live in Guam and I promise you there is nobody here that knows a thing about Mac...especially reguarding this issue. So I'm currently relying on phone support and discussion support

magicchick, try here (authorized Mac dealer in Guam):

Good to see you can at least Google with Lion! You are slowly getting there. Well done

same problem, big mistake by apple.

the longer battery life was one of thé argument to buy an expensive apple instead of a microsoft computer....