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Hello all,
I have had my new 12 inch powerbook for a few weeks aand I absolute love it...
Of course one thing is bothering me, battery life.
The guy at the apple store said 5 hours, of course I said ya right and I asked for the "real" battery life which was quoted at 4 hours. When I am running automatic and 75 percent brightness and normal apps (word, internet, airport) I get 3.5 - 4 hours as I expected but...
When I run certian apps, i.e. garage band, photoshop with huge files, FCP, and expecially VPC 7 Win XP for one single app I need the battery goes to about 2.5 hours, a loss of about 1.25 hours. While I do not mind using a power adaptor for some of these things or having a second battery I would like a little more battery life.
What kind of battery life do most get with the 12 inch powerbook and more impartantly, is COU usage direct relation of batterylife?
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Power consumption a function of application?
MultiQuote
#3
d00d 
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Posted 01 December 2004 - 05:30 AM
There also energy saver settings that will affect CPU power consumption. If I remember correctly, the settings are Reduced, Performance, and Automatic.
Reduced forces the processor to perform at a lower clock cycle to use less energy. Performance makes it run full speed all the time. Automatic scales the clock cycle as necessary (slowing it down during relative inactivity, speeding it up for intense periods).
I personally set mine up to use Reduced when using batteries and Performance when using the power adapter. Perhaps you're using Automatic, which would cause the CPU to gobble more juice when running the more powerful applications.
(This is in addition to what Rob said.)
Reduced forces the processor to perform at a lower clock cycle to use less energy. Performance makes it run full speed all the time. Automatic scales the clock cycle as necessary (slowing it down during relative inactivity, speeding it up for intense periods).
I personally set mine up to use Reduced when using batteries and Performance when using the power adapter. Perhaps you're using Automatic, which would cause the CPU to gobble more juice when running the more powerful applications.
(This is in addition to what Rob said.)
#4
PowerBook12
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Posted 01 December 2004 - 01:26 PM
your times sound right about inline with what i normally get. although in alot of the spaces i work i can bring the screen way, way down and i think that helps eek out a little more.
#5
Nobody
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Posted 02 December 2004 - 11:18 AM
If you notice, the claims of time a battery may last in any PowerBook/notebook it is worded skillfully as "up to" x number of hours. Generally speaking these are always most optimistic estimates but to be fair, as already pointed out in previous posts, it depends on many things so determining the "average" usage is not a very objective exercise. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif
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