So, I feel like my MacBook Pro has been going to crap over the past six months, somewhat linked to Mac OS updates (versions and security updates).

When waking from sleep the machine used to be able to connect to my wireless network pretty much instantly. So fast in fact that I could immediately type a URL into the browser and have it start loading.

Now it can take up to 20 seconds. Usually less than 10, but still a long time. Can't do anything with the network during this time obviously. Mail will often check for mail and find itself unable to connect since no connection exists. This absolutely never used to happen before.

I'm also finding it takes a lot longer to put the machine to sleep. That used to happen almost instantly too. Now it's like I have to wait over a minute before the machine actually goes to sleep when closing the calmshell.

Waking takes longer as well.

And lastly, my battery life is abysmal. I mentioned long ago that I could easily get 7 hours, but now i'm lucky to get 3. At full charge I believe the power meter in the menu bar reports just over 4. And that can ping pong a bit, but starts reducing rather quickly, without doing anything more than surfing the web and email (also running Pathfinder and Evernote - which I've been doing all along however).

Anyone else notice any of these issues with their machines lately? I'm going to have to find some time to actually benchmark the battery so that I can complain to Apple about it. It's quite unacceptable to me.

Have you cleaned out or reordered the list of WiFi access points your system remembers? You can see this list in System Preferences - Network - Airport - Advanced. When it wakes from sleep, it searches that list in order from top to bottom to decide what network to try and join. Maybe your home network has moved way to the bottom, and it's busy looking at others first.

Going to sleep can be affected by a few things. Have you added more RAM lately? By default, a Mac laptop will write memory out to the disk before sleep mode. Also, if your hard drive is nearly full, there may not be a good contiguous place to write the image to, so it may just be taking longer in general due to fragmentation. If you want to test if it's having problems with safe sleep or something else, run the following in terminal:
"sudo pmset -g" and note what number is by hibernatemode for future reference. Then run:
"sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0" to turn off safe sleep. See if the time returns to near instant.

Battery life is a hard one without knowing how many cycles your battery has been through, and situations like that. Open System Profiler and check to see what the difference is between the full charge capacity and the current remaining. Do this when the system says it's at full charge. Also note the health information. From what I remember, you also have a system with the dual video card setup, maybe it's running the more power hungry dedicated one more often. You can use gfxCardStatus to monitor and change what card is active. I've seen some odd programs kick me over from Intel to Nvidia. If you have one of the older NVidia9400/9600 setups, this tool will allow you to switch on the fly instead of having to log out and back in.

And beyond those specifics, you can always run through the standard OS X fixup tips:
1. Run disk and permissions repair in Disk Utility
2. Reapply the latest OS X full combo update, 10.6.6 is here
3. Reset the SMC

When I first noticed the issue I made sure that my home network was listed first and pruned out pretty much everything else except for the network at my brother's and parents'.



Nope. But since noticing the issue I've added a faster drive and that hasn't helped.



It's only supposed to do this for zero power sleep (what's called hibernation in Windows world). That's supposed to be triggered automatically when the battery level is very low. Have things changed in the past year so that this is happening all the time?



Loads of space free on the new drive and since migrating it should have a pretty large contiguous chunk.

Thanks for the hibernation tips, I'll take a look.



Battery is at 354 or so cycles which is low for the supposed 1000 cycle life of this battery. At the 1000 cycle count it's still supposed to have plenty of juice left, just reduced from what it was originally. I'm also sure the video mode is set to the conservative lower power setting - I double checked this a few times and I always keep it set that way. Battery status says "normal." It used to show over 7 hours remaining but I never see a time anywhere close to that anymore.

Will take a look at that gfx switching tool as well. It would be strange if the System Prefs wasn't showing the correct setting - and it would explain the reduced battery life, that's for sure.

I've done all the steps you mention at the end, including the SMC reset a few months ago. No change. Well, that is to say, I did them due to issue with CPU usage and fan spin-up, probably before I noticed that battery life was greatly diminished. It may be that the diminished battery issues only happened after the SMC shenanigans actually.

I also have a number of the Apple proprietary diagnostics tools but I haven't yet dug them out to try them. Only a couple are fit for this machine so I have to look up which disc to use first.

Thanks for the tips, I have a few things to check out.

My initial Intel MacBook Pro wrote out the memory to disk every time, as does my current system. From what I understand, this is normal. The machine still goes into normal sleep, with RAM contents being held by using battery power. If the battery drains completely, then it will resume using the on disk memory image, aka resuming from hibernation.

The reason it was implemented this way was to support hot swapping batteries. The older Powerbooks had a separate internal reserve battery used for keeping things alive long enough for a swapout to occur. The Macbooks got rid of that in favor of the hybrid sleep/hibernation support. My guess is that they also didn't want to wake a system near low power to write out memory, as it may be in motion at that point, triggering the hard drive to remain parked.

I think I may have found the culprit to the battery life. I had noticed this before then must have gotten used to it or forgotten.

I believe the new drive I have in my system, a Seagate Momentus XT is never spinning down. Well, it does spin down briefly ever now and then, but immediately spins right back up again.

I've found a thread over on the Seagate forums of people posting all manner of complaints regarding crashes, slow access and the lack of spinning down. I get great performance and don't notice any pauses that others have mentioned - at least none attributable to the drive. But I do get what a couple of people have mentioned and that's the drastically reduced battery life.

Looks like I may have to retire this thing to an external enclosure for backups.

I'm taking the MBP to the Apple Store today to have the battery looked at. Its charge longevity got better after replacing the HD, but not up to the level I would have liked.

Yesterday I noticed there was a warning message in the energy menu bar item saying the battery needed to be serviced.

Fingers crossed that I can get a new battery out of this.

They weren't able to run their diag test and he wasn't sure why, so the genius just ordered me a new battery and said they'd call when it was in the store.

If it's not the battery, I can only assume it would be the charging system. He found it very strange that the cycle count was only 382 since I've had the machine almost 2 years. During they day I generally run with it plugged in, but I unplug it pretty much every night to run on battery power.

Seems about right to me if you aren't draining it every night.

382 cycles (100-0%)/Almost 2 years ~ 700 days = an average of ~54% use of the battery per day. Being that it's a ~7 hour battery, thats a bit over 3.5 hours of daily battery use.

Didn't get that. In what way is it "about right".
Did you mean the battery had reached its advertized EOL?

This battery is supposed to do 1000 cycles before it gets to 80% capacity.

No, meant the cycle count sounds about right for the way Bruno has used the machine.

New battery reports over 7.5 hours with 93% left on it. The old battery would never report anything over 6 hours at any capacity. It used to back the first year of course.

We'll see how this goes. I still have to do a full charge-deplete cycle.