Apple :: Battery Performance Under Windows
Jun 21, 2009how much is battery performance decreased when running windows?
What is the best option to run windows to achieve the least amount of battery decrease?
how much is battery performance decreased when running windows?
What is the best option to run windows to achieve the least amount of battery decrease?
I just got my new MBP 15 last week (my first Mac!) and it is awesome. I just have one question right now:
I noticed on my gf's MBP (2007) that when you click on the battery icon, there is an option for better battery life or better performance, but I don't see that option when I click on my battery icon. I don't see this option under Energy Saver preferences either. I updated all the software the day I got the machine too. Are these options just automatic now on the new MBPs?
I do predominantly web surfing, editing photos and rendering videos on my Macbook Pro.
I have it set for Better Battery Life.
When should I set it up for "Better Performance"? Gaming?
What do you have yours set up with and what applications are you predominantly running? If you are running Windows, also, does running with Better Performance make a difference?
I recently upgraded my wife's laptop from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate and almost everything works fine on it. The one sticking point through has been the battery behaving oddly in Win7. The first thing is that the battery icon has a red X on it and when you hover over it it states that I should consider replacing my battery. When the laptop runs unplugged, it literally lasts 20 minutes before it powers itself off. This is a huge difference when it would last over 2 hours in Vista just before the upgrade.
I'm wondering if there are specific drivers I should install or downgrade even though everything in Device Manager no longer has any yellow exclamation marks (I had to install some drivers after installing Win7). FYI, this laptop is about 1.5 years old.
If I can't find a solution to the low battery performance, I may have to revert her laptop back to Vista which would totally negate the reason for buying Win7 in the first place for her machine.
why when I run 3dmark, on the battery as opposed to off the power, does the m1730 run like a pile of crap?
The opening scene of Return To Proxycon usually hits 85-90 fps and about a 70 minimum, then goes down to 30 when it goes across the room to the troopres with guns.
But when I run it on battery, it wont go over 30 fps for the opening scene and foes into single figures when it goes across the room? Is this normal ? Surely not, as it makes a 'gaming laptop' non existant basically. If I plug the power cord in the fps shoots up instantly. All power settings are maxxed, as far as I can see? Unless thre is a GPU one I haven't noticed?
Ive just noticed because I got a Dell battery for my 1730 today (didnt come with one - refurb). It's a T9300 / 8800M GTX SLi model.
Earlier this year I bought one of the Clevo 8800M GTX notebooks, thinking I could use it to play games during my daily commute. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that the 3d capabailities of the card were disabled under battery power by the Clevo hardware, so back it went....
I am now considering a dell XPS M1730 8800M GTX SLI model. I would be grateful if any current owners of this model could tell me what the 3d performance is like under battery power. I'm not looking for a great amount of battery life (between 75 and 90 minutes ideally)....
Incidentally, I have just been told by one of the Dell sales advisors that the battery will last for between 3.5 and 4 hours when playing games... ha ha what a joke, where do they find these guys?..........
I have a 1730 with 8700 GT SIMPLE, and I noticed that on battery, the performance is very very very low.
In next week, arrive a new 1730 with 8800 GTX SLI, and I believe that this problem will be the same.
I readed that causer are powermizer, but I can't dissable it...
I just bought a Dell Studio 1555 laptop with the following customizations made
1) Vista Home Premium x64
2) 9 Cell Battery
3) 512mb ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570
4) 4 GB Ram
Can you guys recommend me some softwares which can check my Battery performance. I am not sure if I am right on this but "THIS" software when run simulates various levels of activity on the laptop such as Casual use, High Intensity use etc etc. It runs by itself and then we can see for how long the battery has lasted. I don't think the battery meter is very accurate so can you please help me with this. Thank you. I hope I have explained myself properly
Also an unrelated question. In the future if I wanted can I get my laptop upgraded in the following parts by Official Dell people?
1) Processor
2) Hard disk
3) G card
4) Ram .....
Does anyone have experience with very slow performance on battery power with the Dell XPS M1730?
The problem I am having is the following:
AC plugged in - everything works fine.
AC unplugged (on battery power) - the system is very slow. Watching basic video or a DVD is painfully slow, and video is choppy with skipped frames.
I have been working with Dell, and have updated all video drivers, Bios, tried different power settings (including high performance), and it has made no difference.
Playing an SWF (flash) file with video embedded in on AC power looks great. When unplugging the power and working on battery, the same video becomes very sluggish and unwatchable.
I've checked all power setting and ATI control panel and changed all "Optimize video on battery" I could find.
I have a lenovo z510 and i have one issue... when is plugged, it's very fast. when i unplug, everything is laggy. even when i scroll down on my facebook page, is very laggy. if i plug it in, it's very smooth and works perfect. I don't wanna mention if i wanna play assasins creed without being plugged in... is very laggy. I'm running windows 8.1 and all drivers are downloaded from lenovo website driver support... I've tried to change the profile.
On battery mode to run everything on maximum performance... but it doesn't work. same problem. I don't care if the battery runs out faster. i just want it to run fast when is on battery mode.
How come when i am trying to uncompress a file, be it zip, rar etc.. Whenever i try to watch a video using vlc, mplayer, Quicktime etc.. the video always skips lags etc...
But when i am doing the same thin on windows size it doesn't have any of these issues.
I've got my heart set on getting a Mac laptop but i'm struggling between the MacBook 13" and MacBook 15". Right now i'm trying to figure out whether I get a 13 inch with a SSD drive or a 15 inch with 7200rpm drive. I know the i5 processor will give me better performance in doing tasks like encoding AACs in iTunes and such but I'm wondering what would computer would be faster doing real world everyday stuff like browsing the web while doing abunch of multitasking at the same time. Would it be the i5 with the slower hard drive or the Core 2 with the faster one?
View 10 Replies View RelatedI am planning to pick up an iPad 3G this weekend but before I do I wanted to see if there are any issues with it when using it via 3G?
I have already read where AT&T is blocking some content via 3G telling users to use a wireless connection instead and in other areas, the video quality is degraded purposely I assume to use less bandwidth.
I've had my mac for about 8 months, and its been slowing down recently and the odd time freezing. (I figured out 95% of the freezing issues was using the app 'Transmission')
I want to know what are good programs to help repair registries, defrag, and any other good must have programs for the mac. I think this would make a good sticky as well.
Right now I have:
Xupport - Light weight. Had it since day one, seems to work great at repairing registries and general maintenance also has the network optimizer but not sure how that works.
iStat - Light weight. Very cool montioring program, displays fan speed, memory, and temprature of my macbook (which dropped a lot after getting the little 'cool feet')
Appcleaner - Seems like a great lightweight program for erasing/uninstalling applications 100%.
Other great apps I have are:
Transmit - Great FTP Program, Love it.
Adium - Great chat program, can add MSN, AIM, Yahoo messenger all in one and it actually works great.
StuffIt - Good archiver program.
Cabos - Great p2p program.
Toast Titanium - Awesome program for burning and recording all types of media.
I purchased Drive Genius today haven't opened it, apparently its good for disk check, repair and de-fragging. A friend uses iDefrag which is about 1/10th the size which seems good to me as I like lightweight apps.
In the opinion of you Mac experts just curious if the difference in performance between the 2.53 and 2.8 cpu's? Soon have to purchase the 15.4" MacBook pro for business and was just wondering.
View 6 Replies View Relatedwhat the battery life of the new(er) unibody macbook pro 17 was like under windows. I read a review somewhere that says the new macbook pro (the one with advertised 8hours battery life) managed about 1 1/2 hours in windows, is this true? the only reason I'm looking at the 17inch pro is because I program a lot in Windows and Linux, and 17inchs would be fantastic to display more code, but I still need good battery life. portability is no issue, as I'm a big guy and I carry 2 computers with me right now anyway. any other cons to installing windows on this beast?
View 10 Replies View RelatedI'm a little sick of sub-par Flash performance on mac. I'm aware of the Adobe-Apple catfight.
Using a mid-2009 15" with a C2D at 2.53 GHz alongside Nvidia's 9400 M, Firefox 3.6.3 on OS X 10.6.3. Flash version is 10.0.45.2 -- the most recent release version. Have tried the 10.1 beta (and newer RC) with little change.
Streaming YouTube vids staggers every minute or two for a few seconds. This is not an issue I've had much, if any, of on a Windows box.
I've tried the about:config suggestion where you extend the time in which Firefox saves its state in case of a crash; still seeing the stuttering. Is this just a Firefox issue? Firefox + Mac issue?
I'd migrate to Chrome / Safari, but both browsers seem to render fonts smaller than Firefox does; Safari has a minimum font limit, but it seems like that's not always respected (or 9-point fonts are much smaller than I'd imagine).
I am pretty much deciding between keeping my macbook pro (in sig) and upgrading to an imac 24" with the ati 4850. With student discount it would cost me 1879 + tax. I just dont know if its worth it for me. Most all the pc games i own can be maxed on the pro,Save for world in conflict, crysis, and some others (about 5). My 360 gets most of my gaming time anyway. I just am thinking that it would be great to have the extra power in the 4850 for some of my current titles and having power for future titles would be nice. Also who couldnt use more speed for final cut express and such.
One game that annoys me on my macbook pro is Unreal 3. It is an amazingly graphical game. The new patch enables comprehesive settings adjustment. The thing that bothers me is that I can max it but fps drops by 65% on the water level. I want a card that wont have problems like this. Im not expecting wonders with the 4850, i would still use the modpacks for crysis, and run WiC in DX9.
However am i just missusing the macbook pro? What windows operating system runs smoothest on it? I have tried xp 32 bit and noticed some glitches with the led keyboard and such. Would 64 bit be the better option? Would upgrading the ram help at all? Im pretty convinced it wouldnt because as for vram i got double the ram compared to most people with the macbook pro, and still notice about the exact same performace. Also drivers? I never even touched or looked at the drivers? How do install drivers on a mac? Do i just go to nvidia's site on windows? If i erase the bootcamp partiiton will it delete the drivers? Will it conflict with leopard?
I've been hearing good things about CrossOver from a few people and wondered if anyone here could recommend it. Normally I just game under boot camp, but apparently this program allows you to game at full speed under OS X. Any truth to this? What kind of performance would I be looking at with a 9600M GT?
View 7 Replies View RelatedBeing digging around with my macbook this evening, figuring out ways to spruce up hardware performances, in the form of buying/installing latest and greatest hardwares (hard drive, optical drive, "expensive" ram etc ...) and it dawned on me about tweaking it, just like with Windows.
Yahoo-ing/Google-ing brought me to this blog, from which I played with some suggestions. A nice surprise, not that I had any complaints with OS X performance.
There are a few suggestions here that I had not yet tried, may be later.
--------- Quote:
"
Finder Tweaks:
The first batch of speed boosts come from minimizing the Finder’s system load.
1. Turn off Spotlight.
This will save an older system with a slower hard drive the pain of indexing. Even after the first index, Spotlight needs to continue updating its indexes. It also uses resources to cache searches and be ready for use...................
I have a late 2007 MacBook Pro - 2.2ghz C2D (first gen with LED backlit screen). I have problems running internet games. Particularly, I have bad performance with Pogo.com and iSketch.net.
Pogo.com uses Java for its web-based games. I like to play WordWhomp, but it's annoying on my MBP. When I type, there is so much lag that half the time certain keystrokes get dropped. Also, all of the animations on the page are very slow.
iSketch.net is a Shockwave game that is very similar to pictionary. I notice two issues when playing this game: 1. when I'm drawing pictures, if I try to draw a continuous line I get a spinning beachball, which makes it difficult to know exactly where my cursor is, and 2. the game causes my battery to drain in about an hour, versus the usual three hours I get doing various tasks, and causes the computer to become SCORCHING hot.
I know this seems ridiculous, but I'm concerned because my 2.0 C2D PC laptop and 1.6 Pentium M PC laptop both run these games without a hitch and do so with MINIMAL impact on battery life and heat.
Quote:
An e-mail sent to members of Intel's Retail Edge promotional program highlight a forthcoming MacBook Pro from Apple sporting a new Core i5 processor, AppleInsider can confirm.
The promotion was included in an e-mail sent out to members of the Intel Retail Edge Program. It reads: "January Prize Draw: Win a MacBook Pro. Pass this month's trainings for 2 chances to win one of 2 MacBook Pro laptops with the accelerated response of an Intel Core i5 processor."
Currently, the top MacBook Pro has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
The Intel Retail Edge Program allows retail employees who sell Intel products to access technical knowledge and sales tips, which allows them to earn "chips" which can be exchanged for products. The program also offers occasional contests and giveaways. It was also sent to Spanish members of the retail program...................
Can the New Mac's NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M equal in performance as compared to the mobile 9800GTX ? or is the 330M worst off ? what actually is the 330M's performance like ?
View 10 Replies View RelatedI'm considering buying the model stated in this thread title. I know that the processor is an older T9600 model and not the more efficient P9700. What I would like to know from those of you who have this model is; do your notebooks run a lot hotter (and therefore noisier?) with this processor?
This would be my first Mac so I just want to understand how a particular advertised GPU feature in PCs translate to Macs; PC manufacturers state that their computers have graphics cards with (for instance) "512mb dedicated memory with up to 1791mb shared." If I understand this correctly the PC GPUs take memory from the RAM and that's what the "Shared" bit is. The Mac website doesn't mention anything about "shared" memory so how does this apply to macs? Sorry if this last question seems a bit remedial.
it's pretty well known that if you are using a Windows machine and it starts to feel really sluggish, a fresh format makes it spiffy and snappy. Does the same rule apply with osx? Since the first day of using my 17" unibody mbp, osx has always felt more sluggish than windows xp. Not only that, it's kind of unstable especially with Firefox for some odd reason.
Would a fresh format with the included osx cd help fix the problem and make it as snappy if not snappier than win xp?
1) What is the battery life you get on Windows 7 compared to OS X?
2) Does the right click (bottom right area) work in Windows 7? What about the double touch right click?
im thinking of buying a 2.53Ghz 13 Inch Macbook Pro. Im going to be switching from a E7300 2.66ghz Core 2 Duo PC with 2gb of Ram and Windows Xp. I need something a bit faster then my current configuration and was wondering if the 2.53Ghz Macbook Pro with 4gb of Ram would do me justice. I will be using it mostly for music production, using Propellerhead Reason software, and of course internet use, and HD video. Would I get better performance Switching to the 2.53ghz Macbook Pro?
View 10 Replies View RelatedI just installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on my e6400 with p9500, 256mb graphics, 4gb ram and 256gb SSD. First, 7 BLOWS Vista to shreds regarding speed. It is unreal how clean and efficient it is. My first question is in the power settings, high performance is gone. Anyone know why? Also, the Windows Performance Rating shows the following:
Processor: 6.1
RAM: 6.1
Graphics: 3.4
Gaming Graphics: 5.3
Primary HD: 6.9
The scoring goes up to 7.9. Do you guys think those are low? I'm surprised gaming graphics are higher than Aero graphics and that the hard disk is only a 6.9 and the processor is only 6.1.
Was toying with the idea of getting a 15" MacBook Pro, but as OneNote is a major application with me, dual-booting with Windows 7 like I'm running now, or using Parallels, is required.
What kind of battery life are you guys getting with Parallels / Fusion (or running Windows natively via Boot Camp)?