Leopard cut my battery life in half!

[theman]

With tiger, I was able to get almost 4:00 of life as I was just running firefox browsing the internet, or typing a paper. even when my mbp came with kind of a crappy battery that only has 96% capacity.


after installing leopard, i can get 2:00 at the most. i have the screen brightness at the lowest setting, bluetooth off, keyboard backlight off, only FF running, and the tightest power settings.

anyone else getting this? maybe the time calculation is just screwed up? i have been using it for about 30 minutes and it is sort of fluctuating a lot ranging from 1:43 to 2:13. its moving around more than i'm used to.

 

[swiftaw]

have you calibrated your battery?

 

[adrianblaine]

Same thing here. The few times I've unplugged my MBP it has done weird things with how much battery life it thinks it has left. The first time I unplugged after installing Leopard, the batter life dropped to less than 50% in less than 10 minutes. It still fluctuates a lot and tells me I am running on reserve battery power even when it says I have 33% left. I'll even run it for more than a half an hour after that and it warns me several times on the way down. Quite odd, but seems more like a glitch than a real problem that will probably be fixed soon.

 

[Cybergypsy]

Funny in my other thread I said I get about 6 hours on the new mackbook...

 

[theman]

Hehe, sorry guys. I just realized that I was sitting at my desk with a bus powered firewire device attached while i was on battery! That's why it was so low!

I unplugged it, turned the screen brightness all the way down, and wow! 5:03!!!

sweet!



anyways, I calibrated the battery and let it sit overnight with no power. charged it up while i was at school and when i turned it on, it was kind of locked up and the keyboard wouldnt work. then there were all these black horizontal lines on the menubar. kind of weird. but man! now it says 5:15 hours! cool.

 

[byakuya]

don't want to ruin your excitement but generally the time estimated by battery utilities (I am assuming that you use istat pro or something similar) are very inaccurate.
the best measure you can have is stopping the time yourself with a stopwatch.

 

[thederby]

don't want to ruin your excitement but generally the time estimated by battery utilities (I am assuming that you use istat pro or something similar) are very inaccurate.
the best measure you can have is stopping the time yourself with a stopwatch.

i wish i could stop time.. or better yet, reverse it.

 

[M!K]

Omg. i'm facing the same situation; my MBP's battery life is cut by half with Leopard. I've been waiting for Leopard for quite a while and i love the new functions, but it's killing my battery.
Also i bought my MacBook Pro in September and i took the most powerful processor. i was very happy with the speed of my book... i never had such a powerful and fast computer. but now with Leopard... it easily takes 2 times the time it took with Tiger to open OS X.
I can't believe that! It's also bugging sometimes which did not happenend one time with Tiger.

So... until Apple releases some updates to fix all that... I really wanna reinstall Tiger on my Mac, because now i feel like i have an old machine. However... i don't wanna loose all the great features of Leopard! I so don't know what to do!!!!!

Are you having the same issues?!

 

[stuff99]

have you calibrated your battery?

how do you do that?

 

[Templex]

how do you do that?

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh2339.html

 

[twoodcc]

well that's good that you figured it out. scared me there for a second

 

[magiix]

unfortunately i'm having the same problem, only for me, i have nothing additional plugged in, and i (at least THINK) i've calibrated my battery many times... I will be sure to try it again with that specifically in mind, by the instructions given from the apple website... but so far, the same is true, i went from having ~2.6 hrs battery life (i know thats low in the first place) to having ~1.3 battery life after installing leopard.
i have first-gen MBP and a battery that was replaced (from the whole mb/mbp battery thing) about a year ago.
i've also had the issues with the dialog box popping up telling me i have only a few minutes left and then running the computer for more then a half hour after it.
any further tips.. (( besides buying a new battery, unless you'd like to buy it for me )) would be welcome!

or hopefully apple catches on and figures out what's going on.