Should I take My MBP to the Genius Bar?

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I have previously posted about a battery issue and since followed the instructions for calibrating the battery and still the issue persists. Basically what's happening is even when I calibrate the battery per the instructions on the Apple website about once a month I am never getting more than 2 hours of life from my battery. The machine is less than a year old or I have had it less than a year rather. When I got it I had as much as 6 hours or more on a full charge! Now I get never more than two. My istat widget says Health: 96%
Cycles: 184 Charge: 83% 1:04 remaining. When I first plugged it in after calibrating it was telling me I had 2 hours of batter time at just 14% charge. How can it be going down now with more charge?

Should I take it to the Genius Bar? I miss having longer batter life :(
 
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It depends on how you're using it. Things that will drastically shorten the amount of time you can go on a single charge include, but are not limited to:

-listening to music through the speaker(s)
-anything involving flash
-burning CDs/DVDs
-anything CPU intensive (games, movies, rendering, whatever)

Are you doing any of these things?
 
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If your battery health is 96%, your battery life should still be very good, so something is draining your power too quickly.

Launch Activity Monitor and order the processes by %CPU and see what's going on. If less than 15% of your CPU is being used, check spotlight and make sure your HDD is not indexing (this will have the same effect).

Incidentally, when the mahcine is plugged in, the time displayed is the time remaining until full charge, not the battery life.
 
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Mostly I am just online surfing. I do not use the speakers constantly nor do I burn cd/dvd very often at all. I rarely do that. I do watch movies occasionally but it seems that regardless of what I'm doing the batter life is pretty much the same. I don't play games or anything. When I first got it I was shocked at how long the battery would last before I had to charge it. Does the amazing battery life only last for a short amount of time before you're down to 2 hours on a full charge after so many cycles? It seems a drastic drop. I haven't change my using habits since I got it.
 
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Incidentally, when the mahcine is plugged in, the time displayed is the time remaining until full charge, not the battery life.


I realized that after I posted. Silly, me. I will try the things you suggested. I have actually timed how long the battery lasts to see how much life I would get from my typical use and it's never longer than a couple of hours so I was really going by that. I have been wondering what's up for a few months now.
 
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I realized that after I posted. Silly, me. I will try the things you suggested. I have actually timed how long the battery lasts to see how much life I would get from my typical use and it's never longer than a couple of hours so I was really going by that. I have been wondering what's up for a few months now.

OPen the terminal and type "top" and press enter. Cut and paste it here
.
 
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MBP 13 Inch Aluminum 2.26 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo 2 GB
Processes: 51 total, 3 running, 2 stuck, 46 sleeping... 236 threads 14:33:48
Load Avg: 0.17, 0.18, 0.20 CPU usage: 2.36% user, 3.77% sys, 93.87% idle
SharedLibs: num = 7, resident = 72M code, 1656K data, 5004K linkedit.
MemRegions: num = 11628, resident = 614M + 17M private, 183M shared.
PhysMem: 228M wired, 1016M active, 380M inactive, 1881M used, 167M free.
VM: 16G + 377M 124869(0) pageins, 13989(0) pageouts

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
1248 top 5.2% 0:00.65 1 18 29 532K 188K 1124K 18M
1239 bash 0.0% 0:00.01 1 14 19 256K 184K 900K 18M
1238 login 0.0% 0:00.05 1 17 55 316K 188K 1096K 19M
1237 Terminal 0.6% 0:00.94 3 84 159 2816K 13M 8604K 364M
1234 pmTool 1.1% 0:02.42 1 24 28 504K+ 2600K 1372K+ 27M+
1233 Activity M 0.1% 0:04.21 5 113+ 293 10M 33M 21M 425M
1169 ocspd 0.0% 0:00.02 1 35 22 412K 192K 1116K 18M
1087 Safari 0.3% 32:59.07 16 304 5638 438M 29M 213M 1050M
1076 Mail 0.0% 0:46.89 13 238 443 17M 23M 48M 401M
865 mdworker 0.0% 0:02.76 5 76 88 2948K 6672K 8000K 38M
364 AppTrap 0.0% 0:01.36 4 106 158 5852K 13M 8196K 8567M
153 DashboardC 0.0% 0:08.98 5 141 231 14M 13M 20M 371M
152 DashboardC 0.0% 0:34.49 5 139 333 28M 12M 34M 388M
131 AppleSpell 0.0% 0:01.58 1 31 32 532K 6444K 4056K 34M
99 iTunesHelp 0.0% 0:00.14 2 53 47 228K 4092K 508K 290M
93 Finder 0.0% 0:26.22 9 217 270 3380K 20M 14M 389M
 
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OK nothing unusual there.

Do you know if you're using your 9400m or 9600GT GPU? There is a big battery life difference.
 
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I'm sorry I'm not sure how to check spotlight. I am still a fairly new Switcher :)
 
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OK nothing unusual there.

Do you know if you're using your 9400m or 9600GT GPU? There is a big battery life difference.

hhmmm....no I do not. How can I check. Thanks for helping me btw :)
 
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System Profiler says 9400m.
 
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Thanks for your help. Much appreciate!
 

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