How to Stop Versions and Return Save-As

Regarding battery life, I have to agree with etresoft (as much as it pains me); that's unlikely to be purely or solely a result of the OS, or fixed by an upgrade. How old is the battery? What kind of health status does it have?

One trick you can try to eek a bit more life out of your battery is to reduce the hard disk drive sleep time (formerly known as 'spindown'). By default, your Mac will power down the hard disk after 10 minutes inactivity on battery power. You coultd try setting that to 5 minutes (any less, and you'll probably lose what you gain as the the HD will end up having to power up more often than necessary).

To do so, open Terminal, and copy/paste this command:

sudo pmset -b disksleep 5

After pressing 'Return' on your keyboard, you will need to enter your password, which will be invisible when you type it (so type carefully).

If you want to change it back to its default anytime in the future, just use the same command but change the '5' to '10'.

This doesn't effect the spindown time when you're on mains power.

(Edited by Host)

Thanks for the tip softwater, will try it, but the computer has exactly the same settings it has in SL and I didn't have that performance. Usually around 7 hours autonomy, now if I reach 4 hours I am happy... and fans runs more often than before with same activity. Obviously not if I am just browsing the web but I notice a real difference compared to previous system.

The Macbook Pro is quite new, 11 months, battery health status is 94% with 109 cycles and I upgraded the OS just recently with 10.7.3, didn't bother installing first releases of the OS (I never do it unless on a separate partition for testing).

BTW you have been edited again, not good to criticize new products it seems, don't like that new attitude as I have been supporting that company the last 20 years despite the general context (once that was not so easy to be a Mac user) and now the bigger they get, the less sensitive they are about their customers feedback... as usual money is the biggest corruptor.

Cheers,

Well, that fan activity would account for the lost hours. Have you tried looking at what's going on in Activity Monitor when the fans are running? In particular, have a look out for mdworker (which is related to Spotlight).

Let me know what's using up all your CPU when you look at Activity Monitor. I may have some suggestions.

Another good free alternative to Preview for pdfs (it won't load images) is Skim.

I started using this when Lion broke Preview, but even since I went back to SL (some 7 months ago), I've stuck with Skim rather than going back to Preview.

Steve Maximus wrote:

Great post: "And for the record, those instructions you are touting are just awful. You can install a Snow Leopard version of Preview on your system in a safe way without hacking anything up (other than Snow Leoprad Preview). I did that myself because I wasn't a fan of Lion Preview when it first came out." I still don't see your explaination of how to do this here. If you have a way to do that please post it here.

It requires Xcode, knowledge of MacOS X frameworks, and about 3 minutes of your time. Instead of hacking up your system, move copy those Snow Leopard frameworks into the Snow Leopard Preview application bundle. Then, use "install_name_tool" to tell your old copy of Preview where to find them.