Battery life tip

First of all let me start by telling you what kind of apple notebook I have. It is a 2010 macbook pro 15" i5 2.53ghz. By using gfxstatus and clicktoflash I have increased my battery life closer to the apple claims regarding battery life. Before I was getting 6 hours with regular use, after installing these applications it jumped up to 7.5-8.5 hrs. Not only did it increase my battery life it also improved the performance of my mac. With gfxstatus I use "intel only" mode when unplugged and "nvidia only" mode when plugged in. Opening applications such as iphoto and imovie seem to be a lot faster due to the absence of auto-switching between graphics. Surfing the web is faster as well due to the blockage of unwanted flash advertisements. I am not a computer genius but just a regular user that wanted to share to those of you who are interested in trying this. So far I have not had any problems with just running the "intel built-in" graphics while on battery power. I would assume that if you are on battery power and decide to use programs that require heavy cpu usage then turning on your macbook's dynamic switching via "gfxstatus" would be a good idea.

I hope that this works for some of you who are complaining about your battery life or even performance.

For those of you who don't know, the nvidia 330m graphics that sometimes automatically turns on depending on what programs or websites are visited is notorious for draining the macbook pro batteries quicker.

Thanks for sharing this info I would love to try it out for myself well there are plenty of members in these forums that are having a problem with their battery life this info would be useful for them.

I'm glad you're gonna try it...let me know what happens. Remember results will all be different from user to user. I hope it works well for you and for many others.