Q: Lion - Horrible MacBook Pro Battery Life
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Sep 6, 2012 11:56 PMby tcoates2,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
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Sep 10, 2012 12:23 PMby JPL808,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.
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Oct 23, 2012 4:01 AMby saintmonkey,Quote: MacforumsOriginally Posted by SaintsDesigns
I have the same problem
macbook pro 17" duo core 2009/2010 model
I updated to lion then mountain lion, straight after installing mountain lion I noticed the battery not charging above 98% and the service Battery message ...
Funny when googled there seems to be a lot of hardware coincidences out there if it isnt a software issue ...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 ...
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Oct 24, 2012 7:45 AMby skyrocketinflight,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.
