Mac Book Pro 17" battery life?

[Jay Vaughan]

On Sep 1, 2012, at 10:00 PM, K9 Kai Niggemann <kai at kainiggemann.com> wrote:
are ther more people using a current 17" than Jay and me? 
> What's your battery lifetime?


Mine was about 4 or 5 hours, on average.  Much less when I had ExpresscardPCI adapters installed (SD reader, 48gig SSD drive..)


> mine is down from something that seemed long to something that feels very short. I'd say it used to be over 4 hours, now realistically it's at about 3. It used to be much longer and I wonder what's causing this. Sometimes my book feels very sluggish to a point where I started reinstalling the OS, but didn't do it after downloding the installer twice, only went through some of Onyx' options instead -- that seems to have helped a bit, but the computer is much slower than Snow Leopard (I get many spinning pizzas...!)
> Does anyone have any ideas what I should try?

Create a brand new user and try it out for a day - see if the battery life changes during vanilla web and mail sessions, and so on.

Also, it could be that you need to fix your vm/swap status - under some use cases, OSX can get very confused about how big its swapfiles and sleepfiles (two different things) should be - and if you sleep the laptop a lot, this confusion seems to happen more often.  Check the web for "how to prune/administer Mac OSX sleep files for macbook pro", read carefully, and apply.  It depends, also, on how much RAM you've got physically installed as well .. and what your usage patterns are (lots of sleeping followed by large-RAM-usage apps, like Logic/Live/etc., or lots of sleeping and restarting just to check email/browse web, and so on.)

Also, one more thing: Chrome is a real bitch, it will eat your CPU's soul if you're not careful.  Double-check all plugins!  Some of them are doing stuff they shouldn't ..



;
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Jay Vaughan