What does 'better battery life' do?

Hiya,

Got my macbook today. First off, I downloaded coconut battery and apparently the battery has 96% capacity - shouldn't it be 100% for a new Macbook?
Anyway, I charged up the book and am now waiting for it to go to sleep after running it down. Then I'll leave it for 5 hours before plugging it into the charger. Just a quick note - I left it charging for five and a half hours before taking it off the mains, but forgot to check to see how long it had been fully charged (and I read on apple's site - afterwards - that I'm supposed to leave it fully charged on the mains for at least two hours). Roughly how long would it take for a charge for a new Macbook? I figured about 3 hours, which would leave me OK - is this about right?.

I've found the 'better battery life' option and intend to use it, but I don't like the dim screen it offers. Is there a way of having the screen at its normal level (under 'normal' mode) but with the rest of the options under the 'better battery mode'? The options in that control panel seem quite limited so I figured that the better battery mode is turning off a few other things as well.

Is there anything anyone else would recommend for preserving battery life and treating it right?

Thanks

 

You should calibrate the MacBook battery. Just follow the instructions here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86284

 

Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now and was talking about in my post UNless I did it all wrong and it was unrecognisable as calibration. I was unclear - I'm not supposed to run the battery down to completely empty, am I? Just to when it shuts itself down, and then leave it in sleep mode for 5 hours or so.

Anyway, still interested in how to get the screen back to its normal brightness whilst retaining the other features of the 'better battery life' option...

Thanks again

 

There is the option for a "Custom" power profile. I don't actually know what the better battery life option does... I'll have to find out, if somebody doesn't mention it in this thread.

 

Gotcha, I didn't realize you were specifically following the Apple battery calibration kb article.

I would guess you can always switch to the "better battery life" option and then just manually adjust the brightness to your liking. I don't see a problem with that.

You can either do this in the Displays control panel or with the brightness function keys on the keyboard.

-Zadillo

 

Ah, great. Thanks.

I have to say I'm loving this mac so far. It's been around ten years since I've used one, and after 3.5 hours with it (and the battery about to go off) I've found it very easy to use and figure out. I especailly like the Mac browse and their equivalent of MS office - I was assuming I'd have to dl firefox and install MS Office for Mac, but am reconsidering now.

I'm a bit worried about the white keys and case getting dirty, but we'll see. Plus, the space bar makes a slight squeeking sound every time I hit it, but aside from that, it's great!

Actually, is that spacebar squeek something everyone has? It's not that noticable, but it certainly isn't present on the other keys. Thanks

Finally, there seems to be a lot of useless stuff installed (20gb of it!). I guss I'm going to have to go through and remove a lot of it, heh...

 

I hope there are more options other than just dimming screen, such as make cpu running at lower voltage and lower clock speed.

 

It also changes how the screen responds to inactivity after a certain period of time(first dimming, then completely turned off).

 

I think it does. Under normal usage, I've noticed that my CPU is about 10C cooler under "Better Battery Life", but then again, it could be because I'm running on battery and not AC.

Maybe you could download a program that will check clock speeds and do a test with those settings.