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    only getting 3hr or less on battery.

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by diaper84, Feb 10, 2012.

  1. diaper84

    diaper84 Notebook Guru

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    hi,
    Anyone have this problem? my battery only last 2~3 hours on my mc723.
    my spec is 2.3 i7, 8gb, ssd, anti-glare screen any idea what's draining my battery so much?
     
    diaper84, Feb 10, 2012
    #1
  2. saturnotaku

    saturnotaku Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    How bright is your screen? Are WiFi and Bluetooth on? What are you doing while on battery? Is this in OS X or Windows/Boot Camp?
     
    saturnotaku, Feb 10, 2012
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  3. doh123

    doh123 Without ME its just AWESO

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    What you are doing 9and what the computer is doing you may not know about) drains the battery. Its very possible to drain the battery in that laptop in under and hour... so you need to figure out what is pulling so much power. It could be things saturnotaku mentioned, wifi or bluetooth... it could be spinning DVD drives, what software your using, or even software you have installed running in the background.
     
    doh123, Feb 10, 2012
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  4. diaper84

    diaper84 Notebook Guru

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    Nothing much running chrome and safari and thats it. Occasional email check (sparrow) however i dont leave it on. Wifi is on no bluetooth screen almost max no keyboard lighting.
     
    diaper84, Feb 10, 2012
    #4
  5. masterchef341

    masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook

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    the screen backlight is one of the biggest drains on the battery. having it near max will dock you a significant amount of time. you'll probably need to be around half brightness to get the listed battery life

    chrome and safari are web browsers, they don't do much on their own, it depends on how you are using them.

    if you have a ton of tabs opened in chrome, chrome can be pretty resource heavy. it has a separate process for each tab. also, online video, especially flash video, can have a serious impact on battery life. Also, if you're running the dedicated 6750m instead of the intel graphics, that also will compromise battery life.

    by default, the behavior of graphics card switching is application dependent. It depends on what the applications do and how they are programmed to do it. Last I checked, chrome forces the dedicated GPU to run 100% of the time. Firefox and safari do not.

    You can change the graphics switching behavior using this application: http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus
     
    masterchef341, Feb 10, 2012
    #5