Apple :: How To Optimize Battery Life - Decreased From 4:30 Hours To About Over 3 Hours
Jan 20, 2009
I know the usual drill, disable bluetooth, reduce brightness and etc.. but since i bought my mac (October) my battery life have decreased from 4:30 hours to about over 3 hours. Does anyone have anytips? Use black wallpapers? Use safari instead of firefox? We could make sticky thread for reference for future mac owners. i am using safari right now, and it seems to be consuming more energy than FF
Just got 2.5hrs usage on battery from my M6400 (QX9300, FX2700m, 16GB RAM, 500GB RAID 0 disk array). I was pleasantly suprised by this, as previously I've only managed 1.5hrs.
I was working on a virtual PC hosted by the M6400 - developing C++ code - (connected via RDP), included lots of builds and test runs etc to the (also hosted as a VPC on the M6400) sql server.
I have the following set-up on my DM3T that is getting 4.5-5 hours of battery life at a maximum with light use, ie: lowest screen brightness, wifi off, word processing. I am not running any background programs (anti-virus) or anything else that is resource intensive.
Why am I getting less than 5 hours of battery life on a unit with low specs that is supposed to get "up to" 10 hours?? Is this consistent with what everyone else is getting? Battery bar currently says that my battery's 'full lifetime' is 4:58. I just returned an Acer timeline that had the same processor and 3gb of ram instead of 4, and that thing was getting 8-10 hours easily.
I bought Z500 last week and I am facing problem with the battery life. I charged the laptop for 12 hr for the first time. The battery discharges within 2 hr every time. I just browse internet or watch movies and the battery life is far below the expectation.
There are two power plans - Balanced and Power saver and I do not see any difference in either. What is wrong with my laptop battery.
This laptop is advertised as having 8 hours battery life, but even when i turn my screen brightness right down and run in power saving mode i can just get 6 hours, is this normal or is there a fault with my laptop?
I've bought some days ago an Dell 15R 5520 with i3 3110M, HD 7670M and a battery Li-Ion, 6 cells, 48 Whr. I use laptop for some browsing, listen music and edit text and my battery last around 2 hours. I turn off bluetooth. On official page of the product Dell says that battery should last for 6 hours. My OS is Ubuntu 11.10.
I just purchased a 4810T laptop, formatted it, and loaded windows 7. Now on power saving Mode it says i only have 4 hours of battery left.. what happened to the selling point of 8 hours?
I'm thinking it might be because I don't have the empowering technology and power smart applications installed, but i can't install it anyway as it doesnt work on windows 7. So whats the problem here? my laptop, windows 7, or acer software?
My battery icon keeps on displaying that my battery is not depleting, which is weird since I've been using my laptop for several hours now and it is still at 100%. When I plug in, it registers that it is plugged in but says fully charged. Not sure if this is a magical always - full battery - or a problem?
UPDATE: Cheat sheet to the superclean install posted [url]
I am currently experimenting on seeing how far beyond the manufacturer's specifications I can take my machine. I'm keeping track of the steps I've taken, and will update this post when I feel I've reached the limits of what this machine is capable of doing, along with exact steps on how to reproduce my setup. Here's what I've currently achieved:
- A maximum of 9 hours of battery life on a 6 cell battery using 6.5 watts - 6.5 hours of typical battery life while browsing using 8.5 watts - No audio stuttering/crackling and perfectly green DPC latency - Super quiet operation with no fan noise (fan stays off and doesn't spin) - CPU temperatures around 33 degrees, rest of computer around 40 celcius - Roughly 25 seconds to reboot to a working desktop (not just login screen) - Only about 0.37 gigs of ram being used when idle
Machine specs are Dell Latitude E6500, Intel P8400 CPU, Intel X4500MHD Graphics, 1440x900 WXGA+ LED Screen, Corsair 128 Gigs SSD, 1.5 Gigs RAM, Dell 1397 Wireless, Dell 370 Bluetooth, DVD RW Drive, Webcam, Backlit Keyboard, 6 Cell Battery, Windows 7 Beta Build 7000.
I've just purhased the above for my son who is in hospital having chemo at present. Very disappointed with the battery that is only lasting for approx 1.5 hours. I have it set to a balanced use and so far the laptop has only been used for surfing, etc.
I got a macbook a couple of months back and it was great at the beginning, but now it's started overheating and turning itself off every few hours. It's been bothering me for a while so i downloaded a program called fan control to monitor the fans and my left fan seems alright going around 700rpm, but my right fan is stuck on -1. Does anyone know if that's a problem within the program or if my right fan is broke?
I have a Thinkpad Twist and after updating the Lenovo Settings Dependency Package to 1.3.0.24, I no longer have the 'Automatically optimize for battery life' option in the Lenovo Settings app, i.e., the battery is always fully charged.
I would like to use the battery optimization option, how do I get this function back?
To start I should remind everyone that i'm not a mac user. I have never owned a mac or used OSX properly before today. As such, my opinions should be taken as coming from someone who has much knowledge and experience as far as PC's are concerned, but who is a total mac n00b.
First Impressions
When I first walked over to the Macbooks I was quite taken aback. The build quality is out of this world. In fact, I immediately walked over to the latest PC laptops to compare and immediately thought "manufacturing FAIL". Really, the Macbooks are italian sports cars, and PC's are 30 year old farm tractors to use the typical "car analogy".
The Macbook
I really only had any interest in the Macbook when I first went to the Apple stand, but came away with the intention of buying a MacBook Pro. Let me explain:
The MacBook's build quality is awesome. It's solid, no creaking plastic or flexable build, completely and utterly solid. Awesome.............
It's been 24 hours since I ordered a laptop at Dell and I still haven't received an order confirmation, is that normal? I did get the receipt that my order has been received, but no confirmation mail, when I log in to see the status, the system finds nothing.
In the last couple of months I've noticed my laptop is getting pretty hot, well actually REALLY . Right now after turning it on for 45min and turning on a game, not a really intense game and I'm not doing anything on it yet, for 10 minutes the temperature reading is already 92 degrees Celsius for the gpu, 23 for the cpu, and 44 for the hdd.
My laptop didn't heat up before only within the last 2 months or so, even though I don't use it that often since I'm mainly on my computer now.
my laptop is restarting itself after a few hours randomly.its been happening since yesterday.cpu temp is 59-63celcius.it started after i installed ubuntu dual boot with win 7 on it.the fan is running really slow.i just updated my bios to latest version but still problem remains.
I have a hp g6 laptop with windows 8.1. For some reason, my clock keeps going back three hours after I set and I turn off the laptop. However, when I turn the laptop back on, the time is back three hour behind as before.
i have a dell studio 1747 notebook. now i am facing a problem . while playing games (Hot pursuit, call of duty etc) after 5 to 10 minutes it Shuts Down but i can do normal works like browsing , office , or some simple softwares etc. then heat increases normally and Shuts Down after 3-4 hours.
So i got this Dell xps 15 from the US through my uncle last year, it is my first Dell, and i am at a loss at what to do, it was working great till a few months ago, it started freezing up at will, i couldn't browse or open files without it freezing, the process was frustrating especially since i use it for work mostly. So i decided to format it and start over, issue is it still did the same thing, it kept shutting down at will and making my work process very slow, 4 days it froze while i was trying to browse the internet on Mozilla it was frozen for about 30 mins b4 i decided to restart it, i pressed down the on button and it has refused load up properly since then, it takes hours to boot and even when i get to the password page and see my files my laptop still freezes up and i have to start the whole process again.
I have a Dell Latitude E6500 that I have been using for quite a long time. Recently it started acting up, and now it won't start up past the Dell logo. It simply goes to a black screen with a flashing dash. I've restarted it a few times, tried pushing F8, and gone into F12. I tried the Diagnostics through F12, but it takes an extremely long time and has never finished so far. I tried it again this morning, and periodically throughout the test a message like this has shown up:
Error Code 0123. Msg: Error Code 2000-0123 Msg: Memory - integrity test failed. The given error code and message can be used by Dell Technical Support to diagnose problem. Do you want to continue testing?
Yes or No or Retry
I'm not sure what exactly this means, but it keeps popping up. I would like to get through to start up my computer all the way, but that doesn't seem to be an option. Is there anyway for me to wipe it without F8? My cd slot won't open, and I don't have disks anyways. Is it possible to fix it via USB drives? Or F12?
I have a Inspiron 14R for about a year and half now. This computer has done this since day one for some reason:
When I put the 14R in SLEEP mode, the computer remains in sleep mode for about 2-3 hours, then the computer shuts itself off, or goes into hibernation mode on it's own. The computer has Windows 7 Premiuim.
I have the power saving modes all set too SLEEP, and none in hibernation in any of the selections. I cannot for the life of me why this computer does this. I have a Lenovo I bought about a year later using Windows 7 Premium with all the same settings in the POWER section, and while in sleep mode, it STAYS in SLEEP mode, no matter the length of time in that mode. Any setting I need to turn off, and where to find it?
I'm new to OS X, got my MacBook the other day, and I can hands down say it's my favorite OS I've dealt with. It's so much simpler and just plain awesome. Okay, I'll ask my question before I get carried away...
So, I did some searching on Google after I noticed that my battery likes to hang around 99%. Apparently this is common. My question is, is this a BAD thing? When I see 99% I'm picturing that the computer is constantly pushing power into the battery so it can reach 100%. I mean, isn't that how fires start?
Simply put, is my MacBook trying to charge the battery consistently when it is not at 100%?
every time I'm running my uMBP from battery, I'm constantly checking the amount of time I have left and trying to figure ways to increase that time. Yes, CONSTANTLY. Whenever I can, I'm using the a/c adapter.
Even though I may see 6-7 hours left, I'm still not satisfied.
And just about every time I am running the battery, I'll open up Coconut Battery to make sure I still have a 100% charge hold left....even though my umbp is 7 weeks old with only 4 cycles...
I'm not even coming close to this with my 2010 macbook pro 13 inch unless I turn my brightness down to 50%, on reboot it defaults to 100%. This is when doing nothing or just surfing the net. I can get about 7 hrs, with my laptop screen turned to 50%. Any tweaks available? I'd love to know how Apple came up with 10 hrs.