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How to fix Mac OSX mountain lion battery life with 3 simple terminal commands!

Hello, the other day i bought a macbook pro retina display, and it came pre loaded with mountain lion. I immediately started doing a test on a 3d game, and saw how short the battery life was. I was extremely disapointed by this, and needed a solution. I finally found it. This works on any mac (laptop or desktop) running mac OSX 10.8+ (any version of mountain lion). Make sure to save a copy of your wallpaper because this will reset your wallpaper to default. This will not remove any of your files/folders, except for your desktop wallpaper.


Open up Terminal on your Mac and type “ cd ~/Library/Preferences/” (without the quote marks) and hit return.

Now enter “rm com.apple.desktop.plist” and hit enter again.

Finally, enter “killall Dock”

Read more at http://www.cultofmac.com/178092/this-simple-terminal-command-could-more-than-dou ble-your-retina-macbook-pros-battery-life/#0OSsM0M8cWQpzvwZ.99


This should add a good few hours extra to your battery life. Enjoy!

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), Works with any mac with OSX 10.8+

Posted on Sep 4, 2012 5:27 PM

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25 replies

Sep 4, 2012 6:55 PM in response to richsadams

No effect on my Macbook Air late 2011. Battery draining as fast as before. Max 3h instead of 6 to 7 with Lion.


I need to add that I believe this is ruining my battery. Every day it seems to go faster and faster.


Laptop should not be tethered to wall all the time.


I have called Apple support twice (I have Applecare) and no help. They do not even acknowledge that there is a problem. "Mountain Lion is a more powerfull and faster operating system that it might use battery faster" - but I thought it helps to INCREASE battery life.

Sep 17, 2012 11:10 PM in response to athal7

athal7 wrote:


I also really like the 'purge' command for freeing up memory (and potentially improving battery life indirectly). It's especially useful if you are a developer and running a local development server or a virtual instance of windows.


I used to use the purge command all of the time. But something has clearly changed with ML...it no longer frees up all of the memory plus I get an odd error message. I'll have to try it in a bit to see what it is. But something's changed even with that...let alone the battery issue. 😟


Here we go...


User uploaded file


Still works fine with Lion though.

Sep 18, 2012 8:32 AM in response to athal7

athal7 wrote:


Yea I get that same error, weirdly it still frees up memory for me. This Mac App seems to do the same thing (maybe more successfully) and without the warnings:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/freememory/id460931672?mt=12


Hopefully that helps


Thanks for that. I think I'm going to wait to see how it behaves after 10.8.2. I might give the app a try if nothing changes though.


Cheers!

Sep 19, 2012 8:44 PM in response to richsadams

I downloaded 10.8.2 today, and battery life now appears to be really bad. I didn't notice it that much with 10.8 or 10.8.1, but today I can barely get 4 hours out of my battery. It was at 52% and had 1 hour and 45 minutes remaining. I restarted the computer too. I don't use my computer for anything complicated, mainly just internet. And I always keept the screen brightness as low as possible. I hope the time remaining is wrong, but the battery percentage seems to be dropping fast now too.

How to fix Mac OSX mountain lion battery life with 3 simple terminal commands!

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