[tavilach]

How would I check to see which applications are eating up lots of battery life?

My first day of college is tomorrow, and I want to know which programs to turn off. Bluetooth? Airport (no wireless in many lecture halls, anyway)? Synergy? Temperature Monitor Lite? Launchbar? Safari?

Thanks .

[anamexis]

Well firstly, Airport and Bluetooth both affect battery life pretty noticeably. You can expect up to an extra half hour or so if you turn these off. As for Applications--what it basically boils down to is hard drive use, optical drive use, and to a lesser extent, CPU use. The less it uses these 3 things, the more battery life you will get.
Also, display brightness significantly affects battery time.

So -- turn off Airport and Bluetooth when you aren't using them, turn display brightness down to the lowest comfortable setting, set the Energy Saver settings for more battery life, and try to avoid excessive hard drive and optical drive use.

[StevenWRX]

i get about 4 hours of use on a charge.

airport on - surfing the net
bluetooth off
brightness - a little over half
usb mouse - connected
no optical drive use



good luck

[Maflynn]

Make sure you have no CD in your drive as it will spin up and down from time to time. I also lower the brightness of my display. Obviously I make sure my energy settings are set to reduced instead of automatc or high.

Mike

[iREZ]

If you wanna check your CPU usage, check out Activity Monitor (Applications>Utilities>Activity Monitor). I find that turning off Airport and BT, reducing your energy settings to longest batt, removing CD's/DVD's and lowering your screen brightness does the trick to max out your Batt. time.

[Snake]

A few tips:

Use the trackpad. A USB mouse must be powered by the laptop, thereby eating up your battery life. I use the trackpad all the time, even at home when my PB is plugged in. Bluetooth mice dont take power as badly (because the mouse has it's own power supply), but you still have to use power for the signal. I use SideTrack, so it is easier for me to use the trackpad than a mouse.

Listen to iTunes, not a CD. This is kind of a "Well, duh" tip, but you know what I am getting at. Keeping CDs out of the drive will help keep your battery's charge.

Keep the display brightness low, when you can. At night especially, I keep my screen very dim, because I have enough ambient light to see the screen clearly. Also, if you are not actually viewing your computer but still need it running (i.e. listening to music via headphones), then dim it all the way.

Be familiar with your Energy Saver settings. Like putting the harddrive to sleep whenever possible. Also, there are settings that maximize battery power by restricting the processor from running to full potential.

Keep connected peripherals to a minimum. USB, Firewire, and PC Cards all get their power from the computer's battery. Also, it takes more power to connect an external monitor or extra display via S-Video or whatnot.

Mute the internal speakers. Just for good measure, unless there is something you really need to hear. If that is the case, think about wearing headphones, they probably take less power.

Think about what programs you need to run on battery power. Do you need to run Photoshop filters on huge JPEGs? Do you need to make an entire Keynote presentation? I usually don't do CPU extensive things unless I am plugged in, just because I do not like running them if my processor is gimped to save power. If I need to do something on my computer when it isnt near an outlet, it is usually basic net browsing or word processing.

Close programs you aren't using. OS X is awesome at multitasking, but the more programs you have running at once, the more CPU and RAM power you are using.

That's all I can think of right now!