Machine tanking when running on battery

When I'm running parallels on battery for about an hour, the laptop just turns off, no crash, even.

Doesn't happen when I'm not running parallels. Battery life is still above 50%. Anyone else seen similar issues?

 

Yep, happens to me as well...

Yep, happens to me as well... Only when on running on battery.

 

I've seen this as well, but it bled over to times where I wasn't using Parallels. Perhaps there is some problem?

 

I think the issue is the battery gauge can't keep up with the exhaustion rate so it only looks like 50% etc. when the battery does die.

After this has happened and you plug into the AC adaptor do you get it back as in a sleep resume mode or does it reboot when you hit the power button ?

 

Reboots. Charged it all the way back up and then took it down to 45% or so and it did the same thing with no Parallels running. Got a new battery from Apple. Dunno if it solved the problem yet.

 

From what I can tell, this problem doesn't start happening until you install parallels. So parallels is probably somehow to blame here. I suppose it could be the huge CPU usage, but it doesn't seem that high, and I too now have the problem w/o parallels running.

 

one more case...

At this point i am down to about 2 minutes of battery use before the machine shuts down without warning regardless of whether parallels is running, at which point a fully charged battery acts as if it has lost all charge.

i believe this started happening with beta6. any word from the parallels team?

 

It seems that you've faced some hardware-related problems with your battery.
You surely need to contact your hardware manufacturer to clearify this issue.

 

That seems highly unlikely to be the problem. Look at the percentage of your users having the problem. Even if it's at 1%, a 1% problem across all MBP users would be a highly public fiasco.

Plus, it isn't the battery. I've changed batteries around enough to know. It could be the machine, but it probably is something facilitated by what you're doing.

 

tanks more than just on battery

I confirm that only after installing Paralells, my MacBook Pro fails to sleep properly in some cases, and consistently fails to sleep properly with Paralells running. I am likely to opt not to use Paralells at all because of this, and *really* hope it uninstalls, but I will follow through with a bit more of the beta.

Things are certainly looking good for bochs, plex86, and Xen.

To elaborate: If Paralells is running and I sleep the machine by closing the lid, it may or may not sleep. If it sleeps, it will not wake when I re-open the cover, but when I double-left-shift to force awake, it will reboot.

This is reproducible, as I showed one of my colleagues who helped to pay for my machine yesterday, and I was just able to sleep and wake during the writing of this message, as well as a half hour or so ago.

Also, my battery does not report accurate time, and this may be connected to Parallels being installed.

Is an Agent of sorts running? Some sort of kext?

 

almost certainly not hardware related

this problem started with the use of beta 6. I see no evidence on the apple forums that people are complaining of this issue in general. I only see evidence of beta6 users reporting this issue on this forum.

As the previous message said, the statistics point solidly to parallels.

Let us know what you find.

 

FYI, this fail-to-sleep-with-parallels-running issue seems improved or fixed at first glance in beta6. We'll see if I get a battery reading any time today with or without Parallels, and perhaps, likely, if an uninstall fixes it, if ya get my drift.

 

The trouble you are experiencing is a hardware fault... apple is aware of the problem and have begun issuing replacements.

The known fault is exactly as you describe it and has nothing to do with parallels.
Contact apple for a replacement battery.

Related News Story

 

I had found at one time that my CPU usage kept high, even when Parallels was not running and the system was in idle. It seemed to start while Parallels was active but I figured it was a random incident. Checking my Activity Monitor I saw that Entourage was stuck in some loop while shutting down.
In other words, you should definitely look at your activity monitor (CPU gauge and the list of jobs and usage to verify if Parallels or something else is really using the CPU cycles up.
Note that I do not see such a horendous drain when I run Parallels - when I am not doing anything with it my CPU gauges are nearly 0 as they should be.

 

Battery run down

I believe it's a battery usage issue.

When Parallels is running a VM it seems to suck a LOT of power. Battery life is dramatically reduced over regular functioning for my MBP.

MBP 2.16/2Gb/Parallels Beta6/WinXPSP2 all updates installed, running regular Office 2003 apps on XP VM/256MbRam, all standard VM settings.

-Adam