how does everyone get great battery life?

hey guys, this is my first post i just picked up a macbook last week..iv'e been reading the forums and people have been saying they are getting up 3-4 hours of battery life on normal brightness with wifi on? i've been running it at lowest brightness w/ wifi on, bluetooth off and i've been only getting 2 hours MAX. how is everyone getting such great battery life? im running windows xp on it i dont know if that will make a difference?

The windows xp could be making a serious difference or you could just have a faulty battery.

Boot it up in OS X with a full battery and the same settings, see what you get then. That way you can tell if it's just the battery or Windows XP.

yeah, OSX has built in energy saving options that windows doesnt have

this is something that comes up often....i would have thought you could have read some of it on this forum actually..

report back with how OSX is and we can help you some more

welcome to the forums!

I get about 3 hours of normal use before I'm down around 20% or so and I will plug in at that point. Normal use for me is OSX only with wifi mostly using firefox and/or iphoto. It is my experience that most Windows notebook manufacturers provide some sort of energy management that makes the most of their hardware. Since Apple is the hardware manufacturer here, their software is probably more efficient on their machines than XP.

i only get about two and half hours with brightness low and wifi off. i thought that was common.

anyways battery life will always be something that can be improved. i'm still waiting on a battery that will actually last a full eight hour shift. ten hours would be better though.

Mine does 3.30 with Wifi/Bluetooth/Full Brightness.
I can get 5.50/6 out of it with Wifi and Bluetooth off and Screen dimmed.

I can get around 6 hours with low brightness and no WiFi/Bluetooth. With Wi-Fi on, I get somewhere around 5 hours, which is still impressive compared to my friends who get half that.

I use my Macbook in lectures mabey a couple of 2 hour lectures of typing on word/occasional wifi usage and lowest screen setting. Gets me from 100% to 44%. I close it if im not using it in a lecture for 5 mins or 10mins too (e.g. Lecture is rambling on..) Do a calibration and close your macbook even if its just 5 mins when you dont need it, it makes a big difference! Plus if u need it straight away it loads up from sleep extremely fast! Easy.

I get 4-ish hours with full brightness and wireless on. And I only plug in around 1-3%, I like the battery to run right down and often I forget completely after the reserve battery power alert and it shuts off to sleep at 0%. I plug it in, wait a few minutes, hit enter and it wakes back up charging from 0%.

I don't like leaving my macbooky plugged in unneccessarily and don't like starting to charge at anything more than 5%. Seems to be working well for me so far

Even from new the max i have had (with wifi and bluetooth on) is a little over three hours, less if doing disk intensive tasks like burning a DVD or processing a video.

hey guys, just wanted to update everyone..i loaded the macbook up with a fully charged battery with OS X and got about 5 hours of battery life with low brightness and wifi on. with windows xp i got about 2 1/2 hours. very disappointed with the xp performance but very happy with the mac os performance