poor battery life on nvidia white macbook

i got offered a white macbook as a replacement insurance laptop, in exchange for a (very flat) hp dv3507, and (asside from the crap screen, abysmal build quality, and massive heat output), i'm most dissapointed at the very low batterylife.

more so because apple claimed a 5 hour battery life with wireless turned on. i figured i should be getting at least 4 from a 100% charge, under mac os (with bluetooth off), so happily accepted it.

anyway, a month later, i've had to keep this on charge more often than i can take it out. for example, while watching some anime online, with the screen at medium brightness (under the *very efficient sarcasm* mac os, i can only get between 1:45 and 2 hours. this is just using firefox and wiggling the touchpad to stop the display turning off every few minutes.

a pretty far cry from the claimed 5 hours, in all the time i've had it my max battery length was a little under 3 hours. that was the computer left on, on my desk. is the battery really this poor, or is there a special switch labeled "click me for moar baterylife" hidden in mac os?

on a side note, i can expect the same battery life under windows vista ultimate with high performance and screen on as bright as posible.

is this normal, or is my battery defective?

Depending on use, batteries degrade over time, but for it to be that low might indicate a problem with the battery. Does it charge to 100% or lower.

it starts off at 100%, then kinda plummets after some use. in 20 minutes it goes straight to 80%.

What Model # or Apple Model is it?

MC240

the 2.13Ghz nvidia revision.

i've just been testing battery life under vista, and i am definitely getting more time as compared to mac os.

Wiggy Fuzz said:

MC240

the 2.13Ghz nvidia revision.

i've just been testing battery life under vista, and i am definitely getting more time as compared to mac os.

Click to expand...

Not to completly dash your expectations, but to get that 5 hours, you'd have to be under lab conditions with the correct software and hardware turned off. It's like asking why I'm getting 298GB out of a 320GB drive. It's because, that's the way it is. YMMV.

Some info on your battery and model MacBook:
"Testing conducted by Apple in May 2009 using preproduction 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo–based MacBook units. Battery life depends on configuration and use. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information. The wireless productivity test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing various websites and editing text in a word processing document with display brightness set to 50%."

In other words, not really doing anything at all.


Real world times will be far lower.
The more you tax the machine, the more it will go down.
Also keeping it plugged in all the time is not a good idea either.
There may be operations, threads, functions, etc running zapping your battery life you don't need running that are defaulted to be on.
You may need to do some tweaking with the energy saver/ power use control panel.


Here are some tips below:

Rechargeable batteries: http://www.apple.com/batteries/
Notebook Battery: http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html
Real world reviews: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook/faq/macbook-battery-life.html


- Blackstar

Sounds like a typical Mac to me.

You could try cycling the batteries a bit but since its new, that might only give you an extra 20 minutes max. I've heard similar complaints from Macbook owners, I don't think theres anything you can really do about it. Do you at least have the option buying a second battery or do you have a Macbook with the battery built in?

And just to kick you in nutz while your down I though I would let you know I'm right now going on 5 hours of battery life on my X460-44G doring some thesis work, surfing the net, and listening to music. I've got the screen brightness at 80% too.

i disagree with the above sentiments that this is completely normal because it really isn't for macbooks unless they are old/damaged/defective.