Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

I think the MacBook was constantly trying to download some pages documents via iCloud and this was causing the battery to drain quickly.

Thanks.

Now it shows the AGAdminService from root is using 96-99% of the CPU resource constantly. Is this a process that I can kill?

See this post RHCB.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191543?start=0&tstart=0

Thanks again tarpus! Your suggested link solved my problem!

I turned off Citrix/AGAdminService (which I use at work to access confidential info, but I don't need it at home at the moment), and now my fan is off and the computer cooled down, and the CPU usage is now back down to 7%! I'll see if my battery life last longer over the weekend.

Hi Guys,  I have a MacBook Air 13 inch that came with Mountain Lion installed.  I didn't use migration assistant, but installed a variety of programs including DropBox, Chrome, Office, and many others

I don't seem to have the battery drain issue.  At 50% brightness, the computer consumes 5.4 watts when idiling, according to coconut battery.  http://www.coconut-flavour.com/

Are people who have the battery issue noticing higher idle time battery consumption?

How many hours are you averaging?

Anyone know how to do a clean install of ML, once it is already installed as an upgrade? 

Anyone, even, recommend a clean installation?  Will this solve the batttery problem, or do we have to wait for a patch?  How many of the people here that are expericing the battery problem, have performed a clean installation?    

about 7.5 hours with light use, web browsing. 

tarpus wrote:

 

How many hours are you averaging?

Did upgraded and then tried a clean install. Nothing changed in terms of battery life... still suucks.

For the guy asking how to perform a clean install after you have upgraded the offical answer is "No, you can't" because the installer self destruct after upgrading to ML . But actually you can try by redownloading it for the Mac App Store, and if that doesn't work I'm sure someone has uploaded it as a torrent somewhere. Then use the "lion Disk Maker" free App to burn it on a USB stick or DVD. I did that b4 upgrading so i didn't had to redownload the whole package...

I also did check my Activity Monitor to see if there is any "overheating" application, but nothing... look at the screenshot below, and tell me if you notice something strange..to me it's perfectly normal, beside the battery time left -.-

oh and btw, is that "kernel_task" as it should be? 13% CPU and over 1gb RAM sounds a lil bit high to me...

It seems like doing a clean install should work.  My system came with mountain lion pre-installed.  I didn't migrate over any apps or settings, but installed all my apps from scratch.  I also didn't update to the newest firmware that was avaliable in sofware update (the firmware that enables powernap.)

Has anyone who did a clean install without migrating apps or data, or updating to the newest firmware had the battery issue?

eneskz wrote:

 

Did upgraded and then tried a clean install. Nothing changed in terms of battery life... still suucks.

 

I can vouch for resetting the SMC.

I also checked for permission errors in Disk Utility and corrected them.

The two of these together fixed my computer.

I reset PRAM too but I don't know if that really made a difference.

Also noticed that SkyDrive is a big battery drain and had some issues each startup.  I ditched it but might try it again in a little while to see if it's been fixed yet.

Ya. Wouldn't recommend clean install. Waste of time.

Resetting SMC and fixing permissions in Disk Utility should do the trick.

Although they may temporarily resolve this, I don't think SMC/PRAM resets + permission repairs are "solutions".

After doing so (several times), I can still easily reproduce the problem:

Just start Dropbox, then open a finder window with at least one item in it, and witness the surge in CPU.

Close all finder windows and CPU goes back to normal.

Even if you quit dropbox, the problem remains, only a reboot resolves this.

tarpus also recommended this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191543?start=0&tstart=0 and many people there are saying that it worked for them too.