Battery Life

[Jack Rodgers]

One of the joys of OS X is being able to open so many applications and 
switch quickly between them. This is OK with a Mac using AC but it 
drains the juice when running a Powerbook or iBook on battery.

Process Viewer, in the Applications:Utilities folder, will show the 
percentage of CPU usage and the % of Memory usage.

CPU Monitor shows a graph in color of what is happening. Of course, as 
Krishna Murti (sp) pointed out, the observer affects what is being 
observed and some of the activity show is caused by CPU Monitor and 
Process Viewer.

What interested me was see how much activity was occuring with all of 
the appls I had open. When I closed them, the activity dropped. Some 
are just stitting there not using the cpu very much while others are 
quite noticeable. Any application doing background processing will be 
using battery power as well as those applications that energize for a 
few moments.

Open CPU Monitor and select Display Expanded Window so you can see the 
activity flow. Now as you switch among windows, do work, etc. you can 
see how your battery is being drained and when the biggest drains 
occur. As you open and close applications you can see how they affect 
the battery drain.

It would be interesting to see how earlier versions of X compare with 
10.2.8.

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