Battery slowly dying??

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So I'm a college student and I just got a 15 inch macbook pro in September. I keep it on all the time because otherwise I'd spend half my day logging into the schools internet system.

If I just leave it on and dim the screen[not shut the screen] I don't need to log into the internet and have a chance of it not working.

Now I've noticed that if I use it unplugged the battery run for 3 hours now instead of the 5 it used to when I got it. I usually use it plugged in though.

Is me running it all day every day and not shutting it down ruining the battery?
 
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09 MBP 8GB ram 500GB HD OS 10.9 32B iPad 4 32GB iPhone 5 iOs7 2TB TC Apple TV3
What does your cycle count and battery health say in system preferences under power.
 
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chas_m

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So I'm a college student and I just got a 15 inch macbook pro in September. I keep it on all the time because otherwise I'd spend half my day logging into the schools internet system.

If I just leave it on and dim the screen[not shut the screen] I don't need to log into the internet and have a chance of it not working.

So what you're saying here is that you have the machine set to never sleep or spin down the hard drive or turn off the display while on battery?? This seems really odd.

There's no harm (and a lot of good) in letting the display sleep even if you don't want the processor to sleep. But of course not letting the HD spin down is using up a lot of battery power.

Now I've noticed that if I use it unplugged the battery run for 3 hours now instead of the 5 it used to when I got it. I usually use it plugged in though.

Battery could probably use recalibration, but as osxx said what's the cycle count and stats on that battery. It's only good for so many cycles.

You can use Coconut Battery to get a full reading on this. Let us know!
 
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So what you're saying here is that you have the machine set to never sleep or spin down the hard drive or turn off the display while on battery?? This seems really odd.

There's no harm (and a lot of good) in letting the display sleep even if you don't want the processor to sleep. But of course not letting the HD spin down is using up a lot of battery power.



Battery could probably use recalibration, but as osxx said what's the cycle count and stats on that battery. It's only good for so many cycles.

You can use Coconut Battery to get a full reading on this. Let us know!

I've had it for 9 months and it's had 396 load cycles. It has a 95% capacity. Some of the time the charger gets disconnected and I don't notice and it dies on me.
 
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I haven't noticed that the battery precent/hours goes down quickly, just that when I unplug it, it starts on 3 hours instead of 5 hours.
 
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chas_m

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The "estimate" you see in the menubar when you are on battery is constantly re-accessed depending on what you are doing. You can actually make it go UP by quitting all programs, dimming the screen and waiting a few minutes.

9 months and 400 load cycles! I'm glad to hear it's still performing well at this point, but if I were you I'd start saving up for a new battery, because you are going to need one a LOT sooner than I will (I'm on 2.5 years and 72 load cycles). Once it really starts deteriorating (which hasn't happened yet), it will die out pretty quickly.
 

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