I just got a MBP with Leopard installed, and I want to know of a good battery application I should download to tell me my battery info. I've heard that coconutbattery wont work well with Leopard, so what are the others available?
There's a widget known as iStat Pro. Coconut is better, but as you've noticed, it doesn't always play nicely with Leopard (as has happened on my mbp).
Battery life seems spotty at best. Fully charged the battery time is only 2:20 and after only 15 minutes of use its down to 91% charge.
15 minutes used 9%, or was the battery less than 100% when you unplugged it? I ask because there is a built-in restriction on automatic recharging. If your battery is above 95% at the time you put it back onto AC, it will not charge. This is meant to prevent repeated cycles from building up on your battery, so keep this mind.
If the battery was at 100%, then I have to ask what you were running. 9% is usually a good 25-30 minutes on my macbook pro if I'm running Safari+Word and maybe a few smaller apps (like Stickies or a card game) and have BT turned off. Since the mbp has a slightly shorter battery life, I'm surprised your macbook is eating up so much power.
Again, this all depends on what you're doing exactly, but 2:20 is not normal for a macbook. Granted it's not 6 hours like Apple says, but you should be in the neighborhood of 4 hours.
Does the battery get better with charges? Should I be concerned? Seems like Apples claim of up to 6 hours is way out in left field.
The battery won't get any better than it is now.
The 6 hour "estimate" is really quite bogus and Apple is really laying on the marketing scheme thick here, so feel free to ignore that. However, 4 hours is pretty normal like I mentioned, but this all depends on what you're running with it.
BTW, check out
the guide on this.
