[PJW]

I've noticed that if I keep my 12" in its case for a while, when I pull it back out, the battery meter will show that it's lost some power. I could be at a full charge, close up the laptop, and when I open it a few hours later, it'll show I'm down at 96%. Any ideas?

Also, my energy settings don't seem to help me get a lot of extra power out of my battery. Even with the screen dimmed and the Energy Saver set to Longest Battery Life, I still only get maybe a couple of hours.

[MaxPower2k3]

It all depends what you're doing. The biggest battery drainers are screen brightness and Airport. if you turn off Airport and set the brightness to 4 or less bars you should get an extra hour or so on your battery (at least, i do). Also, if you have BlueTooth on, that drains the battery. Besides that, it just depends on what apps you're running. If you have iTunes running the whole time, it will drain a lot of battery. if you just have Safari and iChat open, on the other hand, you'll get much more battery life.


As for your first question about closing it, when you put the computer to sleep, it doesn't turn off. It keeps the contents of the RAM alive so that it can turn on instantly. The sacrifice for this is that it uses around 1% of the battery per hour.