Battery life, CPU usage, and Heat on MBP

I have a 14 month old MBP that has been having some issues as of late.

The first is that my battery life is abysmal. I can barley squeeze anything over an hour out of it before it dies. According to iStat pro and Coconut battery, I have about 80% of battery life and 250 cycles. I am contemplating calling up Apple (I have Apple Care) and seeing if they will replace it because I have read they do that if it meets certain criteria.

The other two are connected (and maybe connected to the battery problem, too), I think. My CPU is currently sitting at 50% usage with only Firefox open. It stays there even with it closed, actually. So, one of the cores are going full tilt doing... something. That causes, I'd imagine, my fans to sit around 5000 rpm constantly. More temps are currently:

HD: 41
CPU A: 70
Airport: 51
Enclosure Base: 34
GPU Diode: 70
GPU Heatsink: 63
Heatsink A: 55
Heatsink B: 49

Any suggestions/ help would be much appreciated!

 

Usually, processors may randomly act up, the easiest way to fix that is a restart. If that doesn't fix it, then something is wrong and you should take it to Apple.

Regarding the battery life, that is a little less than average but at the same time may fit Apple's wear-and-tear designation, in which they won't replace it. You can try calling them about it, the most they can do is refuse to replace it.

 

There's probably some application or process that's taking up 50% of the cpu power. Go to the activity monitor and see what's hogging all the cpu. Your temps are pretty high and once you figure out what's making your cpu work it'll drop down to normal temps.

 

Yes I believe apple's idea of batteries with normal were and tear are at 80% with 300 battery cycles. I'd say it's just time for him to get a new battery.

 

hey guys my battery is at 85% after only 55 cycles, and my apple care is about to run out, didnt get the extended apple care, should i call apple and try and get them to replace it?



EDIT: make that 82% after 55 cycles now

 

@ Battery: Yes, if you think your battery life is abysmal, send it in to Apple. Attach a note saying "I only have ____ hours of battery life on this battery".

I replaced a 1 year old battery with 80% when fully charged, and 301 cycles. The thing is though, once my battery was nearly empty, CoconutBattery showed only 55% or 60% capacity. And read world battery life was closer to 2 hours than to 3. Battery problems are so wide-spread that most likely Apple will replace it. If not, get a fastmac battery (google it), it's supposed to have some logic on it that will make it live much longer than the original Apple one.

@Heat - yes, the MBP gets way too hot. Use smcFanControl and set minimum to 3000 RPM or even 4000, depending on environment.

I have been watching the fan speed using smcFanControl for the last 4 hours or so and I am somewhat mystified by its behavior. I let it run with default Apple settings, e.g. 2000 RPM minimun. In the beginning, it would run the fans pretty high, even though temperatures were 55 C for the CPU and 65 for the GPU. Some time later, fan speeds were on a bare minimum 2000 RPM and, the CPU on 69 C, and the GPU was cooking on 85!
In short - I don't trust whatever logic is controlling the fan speeds. 85 C is close to dangerous levels, I would much rather have the system be more on the safe side (and slightly louder).

Even though most components will not break outright at higher temperatures, they will certainly have a shorter lifespan.

 

I have tried to use SMC on my system but whenever I set a default fan level (I prefer 3000rpm) and save it just ramps up and then goes back to the original system default of 2000rpm after 5 seconds. Not that I'm particularly interested in having kids right now but I'd like to avoid having my nuts napalmed every time I use my MBP on my lap. Any ideas welcome guys.

As for battery i'm getting about 2.30 with a battery health reported as 79% after 243 cycles. I'm gonna buy a second battery (I really need one anyway) while I send this one back to Apple for a replacment. At least Apple aren't like Asus with their faulty batteries.

@orthorim: Couldn't agree more about the fan control system. I don't know what kind of temperatures it thinks are safe or unsafe but burning to the touch is not good. I'll trust my burning nerve-endings before its logicset any day.

 

Well, although it says there's 50% CPU usage from the User, but the only thing running is Activity Monitor. I tried restarting it and it's still running at 50%.

 

Run Activity Monitor, and set the popup on the right to "show all processes". That will show you everything, and will single out the process sucking your CPU. If you only have Activity Monitor in the list, some setting is wrong. There are always dozens of processes running.

Chances are it's Spotlight (process "mds" or "mdworker") - in that case, what you can do is go to the Spotlight preferences, privacy tab, add your main hard disk to the private items and wait for a few minutes. Then remove the main hard drive from the private items again. That resets your spotlight database.

 

I did the same thing... hmm... I guess Apple isn't hurting too badly from all those bad batteries... I'd try getting a FastMac battery - they have a warranty on the battery and some tech to make them last longer. I don't know how well that works - but I do know that Apple batteries for the MacBook Pro are bad.

smcFanControl worked as advertised for me, except it seems to have trouble storing preferences. I ended up editing the .plist file in the Preferences folder manually, it's a very simple format.

 

I had problems the first time I downloaded SMCFanControl (got Grey Screens of Death), but afterwards I re-downloaded and it worked fine. So maybe try a reinstall?

 

orthorim thanks for the tip. Had never heard of those guys but will do some research on them. Cheers

I have uninstalled and re-installed multiple times but it always does the same thing. It has to be another piece of software on my system or a remnant of something that is trying to control instead of SMC. I'll look at all the junk I have downoaded and figure it out. Thanks Sam.