Os X and Pb's battery

[Lorenzo]

Hi all,

Been looking trought the various posts and threads on the forum but I didn't find any comment on X's power management:

those of you who own a Pb surely have noticed that X is not as good as 9.x at managing battery power.
So far I also had this impression but I never looked too deep into that. The only thing I can say is that when I take my Pb with me at work in the morning (It's been plugged into the juice outlet all night long so the charge is 100%), and happen to bring it up at noon, the residual charge has already lowered to 90%; so 10% of the battery power has already been drained only to keep the machine in sleep mode...

A few days ago I read a post from Charles Moore at Applelinks, in the which he was talking about his own experience on the matter:

When running 9.2 on his Pismo he never would shut the machine down, just let it sleep. He then could leave the Pb off for as much as one week and, upon wakeup, he would notice that the battery charge would'nt have decreased significantly.

Under X (10.1.3 perhaps?) leaving the Pismo in sleep mode for one week means not being able to wake it up again as, the battery has been totally depleted.

Well then, this apparently means that if one has to go through a long journey during the which there are few chances of being able to recharge, it seems that the best thing to do is to shut the thing down after you're done working/playing, otherwise the risk is to loose the whole battery power just to keep the darn 'book asleep ... or else buy a pair of spare batteries and always keep them full.

Don't want to sound petty but i'd be ready to bet that X's power management works like a charm on the new iBooks and on Tibooks ;)

[Mikey-San]

Oh, buddy, are you gonna be disappointed, then. Or not, depending on your sense of style ...

OS X's power management isn't anything about which to cheer when it comes to any portable, _especially_ the Titaniums. My battery slips away like water when it's asleep. It's nothing serious--after all, Apple's official recommendation is not to leave PowerBooks unplugged from the wall for more than 48 hours, anyway (though they don't do a good job of getting that word out--I only know this because I used to work for a Specialist)--but it's truly noticeable when I wake my machine in the morning after having slept it the night before on a full battery.

Hopefully, 10.2's power management will bring us back to, or perhaps even ahead of, what we've grown used to over the years.


-/-
Mikey-San

[famulor]

Apple really has dropped the ball thusfar with Power Management in OSX.

Battery drain during sleep
Power management features
Battery performance
Save RAM to Disk feature


Battery drain during sleep - I use my iBook every day at school, and by the time I get to my first class it's often hovering right around the 90% mark.

Power (mis)management features - OS 9 has all sorts of options for Processor Cycling (which runs the computer at a factory set lower clock speed), smarter hard disk spin downs, and that kind of thing. OS X lets us control how quickly the computer goes to sleep, and how it wakes up. For me, I can't really use the iBook when it's asleep, so I don't find any of these options to helpful.

Battery performance - The built in 'time remaining' menuling in OSX tells me I'll be out of juice in an hour and ten minutes. This is a far cry from the five hours the machines are advertised with. As this iBook is 10 months old now, I suppose this is partially due to 'wear and tear', but OS 9 gives me at least 4 hours (I have not recently ran the battery down in OS 9, so I can't give an exact figure)

Save RAM to Disk feature - This is more of a 'what if' than anything else, but I see it as something that might be used to combat the battery drain. Similar to what the Wintel world calls 'hibernating', how hard from a technical standpoint would it be to implent this design feature. Save the system state in the RAM to the hard drive. The next time the machine starts up, load this saved state, which would be a lot quicker than a 'cold boot'.

On the flip side, every one loves OSX's "instant wake" feature. That is a blessing when I've got to get to some data really quickly. But if it is being sacrificed for hours of battery, it is not worth it.

I invite anyone with constructive criticism or other comments to respond or email me at famulor@mac.com I'm going to post on multiple forums and try to gain some more input on these issues, with the ultimate goal being contacting Apple with these shortcomings with OSX's power management.

-famulor

[ankh]

I finally had to buy a new battery for the Pismo so I can take it on a trip.

I'm up to 10.3.9 on it --- 900mhz, a meg of RAM.

Anyone have a recommendation for the best OS for battery life now?
Back down to OS 9? Or is there any hope that this OS or even 10.4 will conserve battery like we know it ought to be able to do?

[benwiggy]

You've resurrected a very old thread about old versions on OS X, where people made hopeful expectations of what 10.2 might be like.:eek:

I've got an old White G3 900MHz iBook, and I've recently replaced the battery, maxed out the ram and put 10.4 on it. It works like a dream. I got a good five hours out of it.

Personally, I don't leave the machine in sleep mode long. If I'm travelling, I definitely, turn it off.

[styrafome]

The new Intel chips and LED backlit screens are really efficient. I'm getting 4.5 to 5 hours on a MacBook Pro running Leopard...about the same runtime I could get on one of my old PowerBook G3 batteries, but on the MacBook Pro I can do it with Airport on and decent screen brightness. So maybe we're back to the good old days. Of course, with the Pismo, I used to put two batteries in and get 10 hours.