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    For what reasons does an hour of battery life instantly dissapear?

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by Ichigo, Oct 4, 2007.

  1. Ichigo

    Ichigo Notebook Evangelist

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    At first I had Quicktime on, so obviously that was it. Just now though, 2:30 left became 1:30 left instantly with nothing demanding on. That is weird.
     
    Ichigo, Oct 4, 2007
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  2. myshkin

    myshkin Notebook Consultant

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    I find that they jump around alot. mine will drop alot and then gain it back. I actually timed it once and found i get more generally then the detector says
     
    myshkin, Oct 4, 2007
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  3. adinu

    adinu I pwn teh n00bs.

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    Maybe a bad cell in the battery, and instead of it running down by minute, the battery hit that bad cell and couldn't use it, thus instantly dropped down a lot.
     
    adinu, Oct 4, 2007
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  4. taelrak

    taelrak Lost

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    It fluctuates a lot, since it tries to estimate based on usage and whatnot.

    Apple did release a battery update a couple of days ago - maybe see if anything improves with that.
     
    taelrak, Oct 5, 2007
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  5. princealyy

    princealyy Notebook Evangelist

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    I would not worry too much about it, look at the percentage of the battery remaining as an indicator rather. It tends to be more realistic. Also check your batter health that is also an indicator of a bad batter if the percentage is low.
     
    princealyy, Oct 5, 2007
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  6. arikol

    arikol Notebook Geek

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    and get something like the iStatPro widget which shows you (among other things) CPU usage of individual programs. Sometimes surprising programs can be running the CPU hard.
    Even on one particular website my browser starts using around 10-14% CPU, close that tab and it drops to 1-4%.
    That rise in CPU drops the battery time real bad. Dreamweaver also does this (which is why I switched to BBedit). I don't appreciate a glorified text editor running at 8% CPU.....

    If I dim the screen to the lowes setting, disable blu etooth and wifi and use the machine for low power applications like text editing the advertised battery time is pretty close(or was when it was brand new). In the MBP it's a 5500mAh battery which is among the biggest you'll find. Common battery sizes range from 2200mAh (cheap laptops) up to 4000mAh, (good) and 4800 (biggest I recall seeing in a PC)
     
    arikol, Oct 5, 2007
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