Laptop Battery Life
For the past week I’ve been keeping my MacBook Pro unplugged until the battery is drained and then plugging it in to charge the battery before unplugging it again. This is in contrast to the way I used to do it which was to just leave the laptop plugged in all the time when I was at my desk.
My battery life sucked. I would dim the screen, turn off all radios and just use one app at a time and I was getting an hour to an hour and a half on each charge.
Today, at the end of the 5-day experiment, I have had my laptop unplugged and running for the last 2 hours and 5 minutes and I still have 25% left. And I’ve been running a 2nd monitor, full brightness, and WIFI on. I’m also running Safari, Mail, Entourage, Adium, OmniFocus, Tweetie, Coda, TextMate, and Preview. I’ve been using the machine as if it were plugged in and I’m getting almost double the battery life, maybe more. Hopefully, after working out the battery like this, I can get closer to that promised 5.5 hours of battery life when I’m not running a 2nd monitor and a bunch of apps all at the same time.
My thanks to @pchuck for showing me the way. He gets great battery life out of his 1st-gen MacBook Air but he’s diligent about draining and charging his battery.
