Actual Battery Life (was: Battery 10.2.8 Update!)

[Chris Olson]

On Sunday, October 5, 2003, at 02:57 AM, Massimo Marino wrote:
> [.....]
> Now I get - again - 3+ hrs at low screen brightness and light workload 
> (as this email or web surfing, etc: no code development cycles)

After recalibrating my Ti800, as it shows in this screenshot, I'm 
supposed to get 6 hrs 48 minutes with a full battery:

http://astcomm.net/~chris/osx/screenshots/misc/batterylife.jpg

This is with the machine at idle.  However, if I start up VPC and some 
other apps that use some processor cycles, the hours remaining adjusts 
accordingly to maybe 3 1/2 hrs.  Stop using the processor intensive 
apps, and the hours remaining might go back up to 5 hrs.  In real life 
use, which for me consists of running Safari, Mail, Terminal, VPC with 
Windows 98 maybe or maybe not running, ESRI ArcExplorer, AppleWorks, 
and Office X, I get about 4 1/2 actual clock hrs continuous out of the 
battery, but it looks to me like the menu dynamically calculates the 
hours remaining depending on real time battery load.  During 
composition of this email I had VPC running for bit, then shut it down. 
  The menu showed ~3:20 remaining.  Just before sending this email I 
checked again and it's back up to 4:02 remaining with the battery at 
88% charge:

http://astcomm.net/~chris/osx/screenshots/misc/batterylife2.jpg

Normally I'm plugged into an ethernet cable instead of using wireless, 
and I run the screen on about a mid brightness setting.  I almost 
always have a logitech optical wheel mouse plugged into it on the 
desktop, and it has 1 GB of RAM in it.  That's what I get, but YMMV.


--
Chris