Mid- 2009 MBP- How long does your battery last?

Bes

Bes

Bes

Soldato
Joined
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Charged to 100% last night. Left all day asleep whilst at work. It was 96% full when I woke it up about 20 minutes ago and now reads 89%.

I have a 15" MBP with 2.66GHz processor, 4Gb RAM, 320Gb HD.

Currently my system is:
89% idle CPU
185Mb/4Gb free RAM.

I am running and listening to Spotify (loud)
Have a Windows XP Parallels session running
Plus:
2x Safari
3x terminal sessions
Smultron
Firefox
Opera
CyberDuck
Mail.

Estimated remaining battery life is 3:54. Screen brightness is on 6 blocks (About 2/5 of overall brightness) and WiFi is on (Bluetooth is off), and I am in powersaving mode. How does that compare? as I thought these were meant to do about 7hrs with light use? Given what I am doing is just under 4 hrs fair, or is it a little low?

Coconut Battery says I have 6827 mAh of possible capacity, which is >100% after 42 cycles.
 
My MacBook usually lasts around 4 and a half hours per charge, that's with full brightness, usually full volume and with iTunes, Safari and Messenger for Mac running.

Battery has done 234 cycles and has 4344 mAh which is 86% of it's original health.

I know it's not a MacBook Pro, but I just thought you'd be interested to compare. :)
 
Humm i always saw the 7hours as a bit of an over estimate really, i on average get about 5 on the same spec macbook, though i do notice it uses up a bit of battery when on sleep mode.

Given what you are doing 4 hours is pretty impressive, for some reason when ever i use windows (or even vm's) the battery life shoots down a fair bit (vista in boot camp gives me 2-3 hours gameing, which still isnt too bad but shows what drains the battery) so its nothing too unusual (in my opinion)

CThe being grater than 100% battery thing is normal (i get it too) i think its something to do with doing full charge cycles the first few times you use it (sets the capacity limits or something)
 
pingwing said:
Given what you are doing 4 hours is pretty impressive, for some reason when ever i use windows (or even vm's) the battery life shoots down a fair bit (vista in boot camp gives me 2-3 hours gameing, which still isnt too bad but shows what drains the battery) so its nothing too unusual (in my opinion)
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I get the same thing, barely 2 hours of usage when using Windows 7 through BootCamp.
 
My girlfriends 2.53ghz 13" MBP is a week old and can get 6 hours out of the battery with general web browsing, still well short of the claimed 7hrs by Apple. Start doing anything CPU intensive and it drops to 3-4hours on a full charge.

I found it amusing that OS X which many users claim is a lot better than windows doesn't let you change the power settings easily so you hibernate to the HD saving the battery rather than sleep keeping the RAM powered when you close the lid. You have to use terminal commands to change it over not exactly user friendly.
 
Dangerous Dave said:
My girlfriends 2.53ghz 13" MBP is a week old and can get 6 hours out of the battery with general web browsing, still well short of the claimed 7hrs by Apple. Start doing anything CPU intensive and it drops to 3-4hours on a full charge.

I found it amusing that OS X which many users claim is a lot better than windows doesn't let you change the power settings easily so you hibernate to the HD saving the battery rather than sleep keeping the RAM powered when you close the lid. You have to use terminal commands to change it over not exactly user friendly.
Click to expand...
I won't veer too much away from the topic at hand but I would say that OS X is superior to Windows in many different ways but also that Windows is more suitable for tasks that OS X isn't suitable for, gaming is a good example, and the issue that you've brought up here doesn't really reflect on the operating systems superior usability, more of a feature they could have made easier to access. Although saying that I've never really felt the need to have the hard drive and ram going when I close the lid seeing as when I do close the lid it's generally because I'm finished using the lappy. :)
 
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It's a fair point about Hibernate.

This dashboard widget appears to be a more user friendly way. Never tried it.

http://deepsleep.free.fr/

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Kudos to Bes for running at lowish brightness. It's unfortunate that so many people run their monitors/laptops/tvs at full whack and blow out the image :p
 
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K1LLSW1TCH said:
I get the same thing, barely 2 hours of usage when using Windows 7 through BootCamp.
Click to expand...

There are apparently some issues with Windows 7 on the Mac, basically its not optimized for use with the hardware in the Macs, resulting in the frankly appalling battery life when running Bootcamp on a Macbook / Pro.
 
To be fair, Vista has appalling battery life on any laptop compared to Mac OS X, never-mind Windows 7.

That aside, I have Windows 7 RTM installed, and it works flawlessly, even with all the included Apple drivers on the Leopard disc.
 
I still get 4+ hours out of my 2007 WhiteBook. That's what you get for looking after your battery and on that subject have you done a battery cailibration recently Bes?
 
Dangerous Dave said:
My girlfriends 2.53ghz 13" MBP is a week old and can get 6 hours out of the battery with general web browsing, still well short of the claimed 7hrs by Apple. Start doing anything CPU intensive and it drops to 3-4hours on a full charge.
Click to expand...

Hmm interesting.

I normally run the MBP in the battery setting with the screen brightness dropped a few notches. With a new battery my MBP '07 is lasting 4.5 hours which is exactly what it should do with normal use.
My old battery is down to 1.5 hours.
 
uMacBook Pro 13" Refurb brought 2 weeks ago - 4-5hrs on Leopard. Coming from a netbook that did 9hrs, and an XPS that did 6hrs I feel a bit let down for battery life. Then again I'm glad to be on a new, more friendlier OS.
 
Kainz said:
uMacBook Pro 13" Refurb brought 2 weeks ago - 4-5hrs on Leopard. Coming from a netbook that did 9hrs, and an XPS that did 6hrs I feel a bit let down for battery life. Then again I'm glad to be on a new, more friendlier OS.
Click to expand...

Tbh a netbook isnt really a fair comparison, power etc. But 6 hours is impressive. Which model XPS was that?
 
Ah OK found out I was using high performance mode- I get more like 5-6 hrs on a full charge now :D
 
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