It should get a great dea; ,pre tjam 2 1/2 hours. First a question. Is this the actual amount of time you are getting or is it the estimate provided by the battery menulette icon? The estimate is often very wrong.
But assuming this is actual battery life, the first thing to do is run the Activity monitor, click on the CPU tab, and then click on the % CPU column so the little triangle is pointing down. This will give you a list of all the processes your computer is running and at the top of the list you'll see the ones that are taking up the most power. Also, if your Dock is hidden, temporarily unhide it. Now click and hold the mouse button on the Activity Monitor icon in the Dock. You'll get a little menu. Select Dock iCon and then CPU Usage. This icon will give you blue bars for each CPU core. Lots of blue means high CPU usage and lots of grey means low CPU usage.
As you use your computer keep an eye on the AM icon. If your battery problem is due to high CPU usage you'll see the bars in the AM icon showing lots of blue frequently. It may be due to the program(s) you are using. For example, VMWare and Windows 8 are battery killers. So are 3D games. But if you are word processing, checking email, etc you shouldn't see more than a glimmer of blue most of the time.
If it turns out you don't have high CPU useage the problem could be the battery and that means a trip to the Apple store.
