October 6, 2024

How to Conserve MacBook Pro Battery Power

Posted October 15, 2007 at 2:45pm by iClarified
There are a few different settings that affect how much battery life you get from your battery. The first thing you should do is adjust the settings in Energy Saver.

Step One
Single click the battery gauge at the top right of your screen.
How to Conserve MacBook Pro Battery Power

Step Two
From the popup menu you can select an Apple default energy setting. The three options are: Better Energy Savings, Normal, and Better Performance.


If you have the laptop plugged in you would usually select Better Performance. To get the longest battery life select Better Energy Savings.

Step Three
To custom configure your Energy Settings select Open Energy Saver... from the popup menu.
How to Conserve MacBook Pro Battery Power

Step Four
The Energy Saver preference window will open. Select Battery from the "Settings for:" dropdown menu. This allows you to configure the energy settings for when you operate on battery power.
How to Conserve MacBook Pro Battery Power

Step Five
Select Custom from the "Optimization:" dropdown menu.

Step Six
The preference window will expand to show more preferences. If it doesn't the click the Show Details button. Now select the Sleep tab.
How to Conserve MacBook Pro Battery Power

Step Seven
You will see two sliders across the window. The first slider allows you to set how long it takes before the computer is put to sleep. For example if you set the slider to 15min then after 15min of inactivity the computer will be automatically put to sleep.
How to Conserve MacBook Pro Battery Power

The second slider allows you to set how long it takes before the display is put to sleep.
How to Conserve MacBook Pro Battery Power

Note***: The more to the left you drag these sliders the more battery life you will likely get.

You can also select the Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible checkbox to do just that. This too will conserve power.
How to Conserve MacBook Pro Battery Power

Step Eight
Click the Options tab to view more options.
How to Conserve MacBook Pro Battery Power
Here you can check to enable any of three options.
- Slightly dim the display when using this power source
- Automatically reduce the brightness of the display before display sleep
- Show battery status in the menu bar

The first two options will of course increase your battery life.

Step Nine
The Energy Saver also allows you to perform scheduled sleeps or wake ups. click the Schedule... button to open the schedule window.
How to Conserve MacBook Pro Battery Power

To schedule a start up or wake up time for your computer, select the “Start up or wake” checkbox. Choose a day or group of days from the pop-up menu, and then specify a time.

To schedule a shut down time for your computer, select the bottom checkbox and choose Shut Down from the pop-up menu. Choose a day or group of days from the pop-up menu, and then specify a time.

To schedule a sleep time for your computer, select the bottom checkbox and choose Sleep from the pop-up menu. Choose a day or group of days from the pop-up menu, and then specify a time.

Helpful Hints
There are a few other things you can do to conserve battery power such as:
- Manually dim the screen using the F1 key on the keyboard.
- Shut down the airport wireless networking feature.
- Shut down the bluetooth feature.
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anon
anon - August 8, 2008 at 11:10pm
(I'm pretty sure that) the dimmest your display can get is dependent on the amount of ambient lighting your Mac detects. Since it's easier to see the backlit LCD in the dark, it will automatically tone down the backlight brightness. So (I think) if you want to conserve battery further, you should sit in a darkened room. No promises though. The lighting under the keys can be turned off with F8, or dimmed with F9. Saves some battery, but makes it harder to work in the dark. Also, moving parts are a huge battery drain, which is why turning off the hard drive helps so much (Also why computers with a solid state drive instead of a hard drive get such amazing battery life). In this vein you could also keep your fans running slowly somehow (minimum rpm is 1000, there's no way to control them in Sys Prefs, you'd need a 3rd party app, most of which only let you increase fan speed. But if you think your fans are running too fast, try killing some unnecessary processes. Cooler CPU means slower fans means longer battery life).
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