MacBook Pro Disappointing Experience
April 14, 2009 by Juan Magdaraog
Filed under Computers, Technology
I love almost all things about my MacBook Pro, except the battery life. I’ve been reading about it in several forums/web sites and it seems that the poor battery life affects mostly the 2.53 ghz models. The 2.4 ghz model seems to be getting a decent battery life.
However I discovered that it may not be the battery at all. It may be something else. I brought my battery to my neighborhood Apple Certified Service Center to have them check it and they loaned me a spare battery, it was the same. I was still only getting slightly over 1 hour and 30 mins with my MacBook Pro. This is unacceptable!
Just a week ago I was getting a decent 2 hours and 30 mins with the dedicated 9600M NVDIA graphics card, WiFi turned on and brightness at 3/4 setting.
So it’s not the battery but something else that’s causing this. What? I don’t know. I have yet to find out.
How’s your Unibody MacBook Pro battery life? Please share it with me and let me know as well if you’re happy or disappointed with what you’re getting.
Check for a runaway process or application that constantly consumes huge CPU power and/or does excessive IO. If there is none, you should show the whole laptop to your next Apple support person, there might be a faulty component in there somewhere if it’s not a software problem…
My friend said it’s been relatively good, but she’s been having software problems, not hardware problems.
@Udo – thanks for the tip, you were right there was a runaway process. Printjob manager to be specific. It was hogging the CPU and making it run to almost 100%. That’s why my MBP was also so hot. I killed the process and battery life is back to where it has. Somewhere between 2:20 to 2:30 per charge. Not great but it’s ok.
@Quikboy, the MBP is good, don’t get me wrong. Except for the battery life I love most of the things about the machine.