MBP battery ~3:00 hours remaining when fully charged.

[techmonkey]

Since I received my MBP, I only get around 3-3.5 hours depending on what I do. Most of the time I am only surfing the net, email, and IM. When I watch movies/shows, the time is cut to a little over 2.5 hours.

Any ideas what may be wrong? How can I check if my battery is faulty or not? The MBP specs state 6 hours, but I know this is depending on use and config.

Additional notes:

- I normally keep the brightness 2-3 notches below full.
- Always use Airport WiFi

 

[siurpeeman]

it sounds just about right. if you really want to maximize performance, i suggest you lower your brightness further. also, another battery saver would be to rip the movies you burn. video playback isn't so much a drain on battery life; it's the disc spinning. burning the files and watching them later could squeeze some juice out of it.

 

[iToaster]

Just so you know, you're getting about normal battery life. Apple's stat's are skewed in that if you were sitting there with no peripherals attached, no wifi or bluetooth on, screen brightness on one notch, typing a paper in textedit, you would get six hours of battery life. You get 2.5 Hrs watching movies because they're rather big files and require the use of the hard drive more. If you really want to squeeze more life out of the battery, you could stick a flash memory expresscard 34 in the slot... but they be expensive, and I don't recommend it as of now.

 

[mayoko185]

3-4 hours is normal for real world moderate use, I get about the same time with mine. Only way you will get 6 hours is if you have no programs running and the display is dimmed all the way down

 

[G. I.]

Install the iStat widget, it shows battery "health" in %, i.e. what's your actual maximum charge compared to the theoretical maximum.

 

[kolax]

I got about 6-7 hours with my MBP running with brightness completely dimmed down (I dimmed brightness down because I was going out but was downloading something, and I didn't realise I hadn't plugged it in - 21% battery was left when I came back!).

The display is the biggest battery killer - turn the brightness down as much as possible, and also if you are traveling and don't need wireless internet, turn Airport off too, that can use a fair bit battery power.