Tiger-Uses up Battery Quicker?

nd32k3 · May 8, 2005 1:00AM

I don't know if this is true, or even possible. However it seems to me that when I was using Panther 10.3.9 on my 14 inch iBook, with Automatic power settings, and full color I was getting around 5 hours battery life, which I thought was really good. Now that I am using Tiger, I am getting about half of that. Is this just coincidence (has happened 2 times) because I may have been doing things requiring more battery (maybe), does Tiger use more battery, or am I just paranoid?

neutrino23 · May 8, 2005 2:32AM

Possibly Spotlight was running in the background indexing the disk. See if it improves after a while. Check the Activity Monitor.

Seems unlikely but perhaps you need to calibrate the battery again.

troberts · May 8, 2005 11:08AM

I used to get 4+ hours of battery life with Panther while surfing with Safari and listening to iTunes, but lucky if I get 2 hours with Tiger with just Safari running. I opened the Activity Monitor and selected "Active Processes" from the drop down listbox and I noticed the "VShieldCheck" process, root user, seems to use whatever CPU time is not used by the user processes.

I am not sure if the % CPU number represents each application's usage of the current CPU output (i.e. the CPU is running at 25% and app % CPU is 25 = app is using 6.25% of the CPU's capacity), or if it represents the percentage of the total capacity of the CPU. If it is the latter then my CPU is running at 98% which would explain the drain on the battery.

When I inspected the VShieldCheck process, it lists launchd (1) as the parent process. I recall seeing this in passing, and if I am not mistaken, this is a new service/way of doing whatever it does.

If I need to recalibrate the batttery do I just need to charge it fully and then run it down till it goes to sleep, or do I have to do something else?

EDIT: I posted this same message on Apple's discussion board and the response I got was that Virex was the problem. I searched my computer for Virex so I could delete all supporting files/folders. After I did that my idle time went from 0% to 85%-95% (with just the Activity Monitor and Safari running). If you have Virex running on your computer I suggest deleting it and all supporting files/folders, shut down the computer, and then restarting.

wgauvin · May 8, 2005 7:39PM

I have no benchmark to work from, but I just got my PB and the doco said should get about 4.5 hrs. However with Tiger I'm getting at the most about 2 hrs. I wouldn't mind if it was say 3 to 4 hrs, but 2 hrs is a big difference. Perhaps it is Tiger...

nd32k3 · May 8, 2005 10:53PM

Quote:

Originally posted by troberts

EDIT: I posted this same message on Apple's discussion board and the response I got was that Virex was the problem. I searched my computer for Virex so I could delete all supporting files/folders. After I did that my idle time went from 0% to 85%-95% (with just the Activity Monitor and Safari running). If you have Virex running on your computer I suggest deleting it and all supporting files/folders, shut down the computer, and then restarting.

I did this and it did seem to help. Still not as good as I was getting with Panther, but I definetly see improvement. So thank you.

maccrazy · May 9, 2005 7:08AM

I think my battery time has gone up on a PowerBook G4 - used to get two hours and a half now over three hours.

flick justice · May 9, 2005 1:34PM

Quote:

Originally posted by MacCrazy

I think my battery time has gone up on a PowerBook G4 - used to get two hours and a half now over three hours.

Same here, I got 4 hours playing itunes (with the screen turned all the way down) tape adaptor in a car driving to Vancouver from Calgary ( not that it was a four hour drive.. that just how long we got to listen to my mp3s )

Thats better than I've seen.

flick.

Tiger-Uses up Battery Quicker?

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