isn't my macbook pro supposed to have a 7 hour battery?

bambino707 said:

Folks
I am a seasoned notebook user. I switched to Macbook because the 7 hours battery was very important to me. Unfortunately, my macbook battery lasts only 2 hours. I tried everything including dimming the screen, turning blue tooth off, etc. but no luck. I brought my laptop to Apple store and was told that the battery was OK. No one seems to have an answer for why it lasts only 2 hours. To be honest, they think I am making it up. I don’t care what the testing equipment show. Someone has to sit in front of it and see for himself. It is frustrating. I don’t know what to do.

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On a full charge, leave Bluetooth and your screen turned up to medium brightness.

Then, open Activity Monitor. Sort the Process list by CPU. Start up your usual assortment of apps. If you see any of those process jumping up greater than 70% CPU utilization on a consistent basis, you will know what is draining your battery.

Every time I've seen a system that had atrocious battery life like this, the owner didn't realize that if they were running a program, application or game that is consistently eating up system resources, the battery will drain more quickly. Sometimes they are surprised to find that there's a program running in the background that they didn't even realize was there that is draining the battery.

It is the new unibody 15-inch 3.06Ghz – 4GB memory and 500GB hard drive

After using many Dell, HP, Toshiba laptops and skimming on every possible power source, doing the same on my MacBook Pro, sometimes my battery indicator reads 7-8 hours available. I do alot of plain old reading, so everything, Bluetooth, wifi, camera, etc... is off. No way this happens with any of my pc notebooks. 3, 3.5 hours, tops. I wound up buying multiple batteries.

Never used one of the recent ultra portable netbook-like notebooks with the reported 10 hour battery life though.

Anyways, battery life is awesome.