Different Battery Length in Different Locations?

That is certainly odd... All I can say is that your usage habits during your visit may have changed. Other environmental factors can change the length of your batteries life as well, for examile, if you sit in a brighter area, your display will automatically get brighter to overcome the glare from your surroundings, which will decrease your battery life. Small things like this can make a big difference on battery life.

The applications that you may have open can influence battery life. Without precise details one can only speculate on the differences. Here are a couple of support articles that you may useful in understanding batteries and increasing battery life.

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1446

Ciao.

Wierd coincidence? In most cases, battery life is determined by factors such as screen brightness, usage, and thats about it. Unless you used a different charger at home than you did on your vacation, that is the only thing I can think of.

Was the WiFi connection similar/Same strength at both locations?

It could have been that at your home location, your computer is constantly interacting with Time capsul to make sure the back-up is up-to-date, while at the same time, a linksys router is just a router, nothing more.

It was shot-in-the-dark kind of question. I know the strength of a celluar signal can make a huge difference in battery run time for a cell phone, I thought it may carry through to a WiFi signal.

2.5 hours of battery life is not stunning battery life to begin with unless one is using CPU/GPU intensive applications. There have to be specific differences in usage to explain the significant differences that you mention. Unless you have a precise log of what you are doing in the two respective environments I cannot offer a rational answer.

Runaway applications can decrease battery life significantly but that would mean that you did not experience them at your parents location, but do at your home location. That though seems hardly likely and you would know by the high fan noise.

Without more information, my quiver is out of arrows.

Ciao.

From what i understand, there is a check period (every hour) that time capsle will search through your HDD for files that are not backed up. I think it is supposed to stop while the laptop is in battery mode, but there is always the possibility that it is checking anyway, which would contribute to some battery drain.

ComputerFixer wrote:

From what i understand, there is a check period (every hour) that time capsle will search through your HDD for files that are not backed up. I think it is supposed to stop while the laptop is in battery mode, but there is always the possibility that it is checking anyway, which would contribute to some battery drain.

Time Machine has an option called "Back up while on battery power." I have that option turned off.

I don't think Time Capsule is a significant contributor to this. The check is simply a quick poll over the network. The network traffic and energy use for this check is probably a lot less than whatever power the CPU and radio consume checking email and loading up whole web pages.

The wifi signal strength may be a factor, but on the whole it's hard to say what's really causing the difference without inventorying the specific settings and applications in use and the CPU loads of the applications.