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coolphage · Jul 21, 2003, 01:17 PM

I have heard some bad things about battery life in the 12" powerbook. Typical battery charge lasts 1.5-2.5 hours. Is this common? I though they got a much better (3-4) hours of battery life.
I plan on using the 12" to take notes for about 2 hours a day durring school. Am i going to have to buy a second battery?

Thanks
Nick

docholiday · Jul 21, 2003, 01:35 PM

Originally posted by coolphage:
I have heard some bad things about battery life in the 12" powerbook. Typical battery charge lasts 1.5-2.5 hours. Is this common? I though they got a much better (3-4) hours of battery life.
I plan on using the 12" to take notes for about 2 hours a day durring school. Am i going to have to buy a second battery?

Thanks
Nick

If you're taking notes mostly and not doing any heavy-duty work (eg. playing a 3d game, ripping in iTunes, encoding a movie) you should easily have about 2.3-2.5 hours battery time.

Spheric Harlot · Jul 21, 2003, 04:26 PM

I regularly get around 2.5 hours.

-s*

Mskr · Jul 21, 2003, 04:54 PM

I had done a small case study with my 12" PB and reported results in this thread:

I just drove back today from Des Moines, Iowa and decided to use my PowerBook as a glorified iPod, and set up the energy saver like this:

1) Never sleep
2) Put display to sleep: 1 minute (minimum)
3) Put harddrive to sleep when possible
4) Reduced processor power

Then, I set up a play list of about 6 hours of music, started it playing and then dimmed the screen all the way down. I got approximately 4 hours 22 minutes worth of music out of the PowerBook! Not too shabby, considering it's not optimized for this kind of usage. I guess the 5 hour battery life that they advertise isn't _that_ far off of reality. I actually think I could have squeezed more battery life out of it by doing a little more work. One thing that would have helped is if I could buffer a bunch of the mp3s into memory so that the HD could spin down & never need to spin up. Since I have 640 MB of memory on this machine, I could buffer quite a lot of music (say, half that) and have 320 minutes worth of music (or 5 hours, 20 minutes) and not have to spin the hard drive at all. Of course, I don't know of any way to easily do this with iTunes, but maybe another mp3 player?

Anyhow, just wanted to mention these results...

But, all in all, I usually get about 3-3.5 hours of real work off power. I get about 2 hours of playing Warcraft III, since it's a bit more power intensive. This hasn't really diminished over time, either.

Macola · Jul 21, 2003, 05:27 PM

The biggest factor for me is screen brightness. If I turn it down to half, I can get about 3.5 hours of average use (e-mail, web, word processing). Also, if you have Airport and Bluetooth but are not using them turn those off, too.

macfreshman · Jul 23, 2003, 01:55 PM

The 12" has much better battery life than my 17". With the 12" I could easily get 4 hours out of it. With the 17" I am *lucky* to get 2.5hrs.

Full brightness, wifi, and itunes running drops it to 1.5hrs. Can't wait for fuel cells...

Toyin · Jul 23, 2003, 10:05 PM

My battery meter has been pretty inaccurate (and yes I've drained the battery and then fully charged several times). I never get an indication of greater than 3hrs, however I worked for 3.5hrs yesterday (and still had 27minutes left.)
My settings were as follows: 2nd dimmest screen setting, hardrive spinning down when possible, screen sleep in 1 minute, computer sleep in 5minutes, and highest processor setting. I was working in Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Safari. Mail in the background checking mail every 5minutes. I also have several menu extras running (Menu meters, Synergy). Bluetooth is off, Airport is on.

I installed a 7200rpm HD in my PB which takes up more power and use an external optical mouse which uses more power.

ctbritt · Aug 1, 2003, 12:43 PM

I must be doing something wrong then, because I let mine drain, then charged it completely, and it doesn't charge 100% and it only gives mer a reading of 1:15 minutes. Any thoughts?

AssassyN · Aug 1, 2003, 12:54 PM

With my 12" PB battery fully charged and set for Reduced Power, I can watch DVD's straight for about 2:45. Watching a DVD is one of the most intensive tasks on a laptop b/c the optical drive is constantly in usage...doing tasks lighter than this stretches my battery life well beyond 3 hours.