[Fat7at]

I was wondering what the best enery saving settings are to keep the battery charged at the promised 6 hours , my experiance varies dramaticly the best I got was 5:40 and recently it's been under 4 hours

[kafoochy]

Not to be rude, but you shouldn't be upset for some of the best battery life in about any laptop without an additional battery. Nobody has EVER reached the reported battery life claims. It just doesn't happen. Even with nothing plugged in, nothing running and the screen dimmed to almost nothing, I never get near the reported battery life of my PB. Be glad you're getting 4 hrs. That's phenomenal. Turn off Bluetooth, airport go to the system preferences under Energy Saver and change the processor speed to "reduced" when on the battery (assuming you will not be playing games or doing anything else intensive) and turn the brightness on your screen down. Just think of what requires energy and don't use it, or reduce it. There is a good post on the PB site from Dr.Michael about battery life http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm

Just to let you know my Powerbook which probably costs much more than your iBook gets 2:10min at most when watching a DVD and I'm lucky to get above 2.5 under normal usage (which for me is with bluetooth and airport on). 4hrs? My gosh, appreciate it!!! Just think if you got a second battery, you'd have 8 hrs!

[MrForgetable]

I get over 4:30-4:45 with brightness all the way up, automatic energy saver, and Airport on with Safari, iTunes and AIM running most of the time. but yeah, the iBook is 4 days old. battery life will slowly depreciate as it gets older.

[Graymalkin]

Set up some new Network Locations with only solitary devices enabled. Make a Location with everything but WiFi disabled, the system will turn those devices off so they're not using any power. I've got a "Low Power" profile on my Powerbook that has all of the network devices enabled. If I turn my screen brightness down I can get about five whole hours on the battery which is just about the advertised time and my Powerbook is a year and a half old.

Also buy as much memory as you can afford. The more RAM you've got the less likely that the system will have to use the swap space on your disk which will let your disk stay idle for longer periods. Also open your programs and leave them open which predicates you have a large amount of RAM. If your iBook doesn't have to spin up the hard disk to open Calculator ten times it is going to save battery life.

[arcticmac]

my ibook which runs mac OS 9 used to get well over 6 hours, if I was doing the right thing... (the right thing just happens to be working on equations to put in an appleworks document using equation editor... i don't really know why, but it just seemed to use less energy than just the finder)

of course, that was 6 months ago... now I can't get the thing to charge at all.

[rozwado1]

4 hours is good. I've had my current battery for about 6 months and I can get 3:20 with brightness on high, running minimal apps (Safari, iChat). DVDs - I get about 2:30. Enjoy the 4 while you can.

[vixi]

I got 6 hours out of my ibook. This was during Hurricane Charley. We had (still have) no electricity, and I was using dial-up. I was only using ichat, xjournal, safari (sparingly) and terminal. I had the lowest brightness on and turned off wifi and bluetooth.

My ibook is about a month old.

Currently I am at a hotel, so I don't have to use my battery! :>

[artaxerxes]

Still getting good results on mi 1.07GHz iBook - the key is the screen brightness IMHO - turn it to one step from off. Switch of Airport and you are golden

[darcybaston]

I got way over 6 hours a few times by bringing brightness to the lowest setting before it shuts the lcd off, and just typing with text edit. Airport was off and all that of course.

Saving the battery life is directly related to how much the computer is used. Your battery will last for several days if you only wake it from sleep for a few minutes a few times a day hehe.

Some Techniques:
1-Don't use it, or use it minimaly.
2-Avoid accessing the hard drive.
3-Avoid cpu heavy tasks (like games, resizing windows, screen savers, using iLife apps)
4-Bring screen brightness way down.
5-Work in a cool place to diminish the probability of the fans coming on.
6-Work on a hard flat surface so heat can escape, and avoid fan use.
7-Open the apps you plan on using on your battery while you're plugged in to get them cached. Don't quit them.
8-Set CPU speed to 'reduced' in energy saver preferences
9-Make the charge indicator in the menu bar show a time countdown, and don't click there to check anything, it's a cpu hogging activity. I discovered this when recording audio while on batery power. I wasn't showoing the time, and wanted to see it. Each time I checked, I discovered a gap in my audio recording. (14" 933mhz 640MB ram using Sound Studio)
10-Choose to use text edit (or pico in a terminal, if its transparency is turned off) to capture/type text instead of Office or Appleworks if formatting isn't important right then and there. You can convert and reformat once on outlet power again.
11-Set the preferences of all apps that display images to not resize anything when images are opened. Unless you'd like to save cpu cycles by not scrolling. You're choice.
12-Go easy on minimizing and expose use
13-Page down instead of scrolling slowly
14-Mute the volume.
15-If you're going to be ripping a lot of CDs, set iTunes to just capture to AIFF, instead of doing cpu heavy encoding to m4a/mp3 etc. You can encode later.
16-Use Preview instead of Adobe Reader.
17-Use Opera instead of Safari as your browser. Especially when writing message forum posts.

Those are all extremely anal tips, but when you add them all up during a 4 hour work session or whatever, you can probably save a half hour.

[Fat7at]

thanks guys for the wonderfull tips.

[SSharon]

So I've only had my ibook for about a week but the 3 times I have fully charged it and used it I've gotten over 6 hours. I do most of the listed things here to save battery power but I wonder how accurate the clock is for most people here. For example, I woke up my ibook and saw that after calculating of course it said I had 9 hours remaining. Well thats clearly wrong but I wonder what made it say that as it happens often.

[darcybaston]

I've seen mine say 9 hours as well while the brightness was down to the last notch and I was typing in text edit.

[macaddict0001]

it say's that you have nine hours because it takes the amount of power currently being used as an average over the past certain amount of time and since you just wake up from sleep it is assuming you are using half as much power because half of the time you were in sleep mode as for getting the best battery life newer battery's can hold more charge set setting like spin down hard disk when possible and processor speed reduced also turn things like genie effect and dock magnification off and screen brightness down also turn the volume on mute even if you are not listening to anything don't use disk's in your cd drive unless you have to and don't use thing's that use lot's of processor or graphics power. it also never hurts to turn off airport and blutooth and I would recommend unplugging everything you can especially usb.

my battery life with all these thing's observed is about 5 hours and 40 minute's.
there is also a terminal command which goes as follows:
go to terminal (located in your appications>utilities folder)

and run the following command

" ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo"

the response will look like this

"IOBatteryInfo" = ({"Capacity"=4144,"Amperage"=1200,"Current"=160,"V oltage"=11431,"Flags"=1090519175})

the flags will equal a regular # like 4, if it is not plugged into the wall.
my read out is as follows:
"IOBatteryInfo" = ({"Capacity"=4410,"Amperage"=0,"Current"=$
I don't know what the norm is though.

[wataru]

Originally posted by darcybaston:
10-Choose to use text edit (or pico in a terminal, if its transparency is turned off)

On a Quartz Extreme-capable machine, transparency will be handled by the video card. The video card is running anyway, and it doesn't do any extra work to handle the transparency, so there's no reason to turn it off.

[darcybaston]

Ok, cool. Thanks wataru! I'll remove that from my mental list.

[nJm]

I get about 5:30 on my 1.07ghz 12" if I turn off airport and turn screen brightness down to lowest setting. During this time I'm typing up lecture notes in MS Word 2004 while it is recording the audio to the HD. Leaving airport on or turning up brightness tends to only give 4 hours tops. Either way it outperforms all of the Windows laptops I've used so I am really happy