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Here is a stream-of-consciousness log of my first evening back in Leopard, followed by some observations made on a road trip with the PowerBook on Wednesday.
Tuesday, November 27 (temperatures noted are processor bottomside temps. as tracked by Temperature Monitor Lite).
6:00 Booted into Leopard. Temperature quickly runs up to about 45° C after logging on to the Internet via dialup modem.
6:10: Start up Eudora 6.2.4 and check several email accounts. Eudora, as usual in Leopard, feels like it's struggling, mail download performance is maddeningly sluggish, and processor temperature spikes to 56°, before falling back after letting Eudora idle and starting Opera 9.50 to surf some Web pages, stabilizes around 49-50°, and then gradually waxed and waned as the surfing session in OPera proceeded, peaking at 57.5° - just one degree below the PowerBook's cooling fan kick-in point.
7:25: Took a short break, and temperature fell back to 54.5°
7:30: Back into Mail Beacon and Eudora to check more email; temperature quickly climbs to 58.2° just short of triggering the fans.
7:51; Just short of two hours after bootup, still working in Eudora, temperature reaches 58.5° and the the fans kick in, running for about one minute, which brings the temp down to 54.5°
8:06: Back surfing with Opera. Temperature holding at 52-56° range.
8:17: Still logged on the the Web, but working in Tex Edit Plus for a bit. Temp. falls back to 49-50°
8:28: Temp 48.2°. Hitting a link that will start up Safari 3. After a couple of page loads, temp. spikes up to 52°, but falls back to 48° and change with Safari idling.
8:47: Back into Eudora to send some mail. Temperature spikes up to 53° almost instantly. I'm definitely detecting a pattern here. Eudora is a Carbon application, not Cocoa, and I'm wondering how much that has to do with it.
8:53: Start Time Machine for the first time. Temp. goes back up to 53° Hey, this is really slick. Time Machine recognizes my SimpleTech Pininfarina SimpleDrive 500 GB USB external hard drive, and soon initiates a global backup
9:00 Logged off the Internet and left the PowerBook and Time Machine to their own devices.
11:33: Time machine backup (which commenced at 9:41) is 50 percent complete, and the temperature hanging at about 55° - 56°
11:36 With backup still proceeding in the background, but back to work in TE+, temp. quickly spikes up to 58.5° and fans spool up.
Midnight to 3:00 AM: Continued working, composing Wednesday's news stories and posting them to Applelinks with Time Machine running in the background. The fans cycled pretty much continuously throughout.
Time Machine took about five hours to back up the 50 GB or so of data on my 80 GB hard drive. It would probably have been faster at that had I not been working at other things simultaneously. Time machine is the coolest and easiest to use backup software I've encountered. A big thumbs-up to Apple on that score.
Wednesday November 28: Off on a day-long road trip for a dental appointment and sundry shopping chores. I usually take one of my Pismos on such excursions, but went with the 17" PowerBook this time to check out Leopard on the road.
My dentist was running late, so I used the waiting time efficiently by doing some work with the PowerBook. Whoa! the battery charge was diminishing like an ice cream cone in the hot sun in July. After about half an hour, with the backlight turned down to "murky" I was still down from a full charge to 77 percent.
On the way home in the late afternoon, I swung by the WiFi hot spot in front of my local library to check out Leopard with Airport and on a broadband connection.
As soon as I opened the display lid, the battery charge, which should have been 77 percent minus whatever five hours or so in sleep mode ate up, plummeted to zero and the 'Book spontaneously shut down with only the briefest flash of the "you are running on reserve power" dialog.
I had my Kensington Auto-Air power adapter in the backpack, so I plugged that into the truck's cigarette lighter socket, but had a few tense minutes with the PowerBook evidently dead and unresponsive.
Finally it rebooted, showing that the battery was recharging from the Kensington adapter.
Airport recognized the library broadband connection with no trouble, and I was able to do a bit of surfing and experimenting. I found that Eudora worked much better on the broadband connection than it does in Leopard on my slow office dialup connection. I was able to send email with Eudora through my ISP's SMTP server, which doesn't work in Leopard over dialup. Things just stall.
On the other hand, I struck out again trying to get Leopard Mail to work even over the broadband link. I entered the account information in the setup helper dialog, but no joy. When the program tries to confirm the connection to the POP server the little in-progress wheel just spins and spins. I gave up.
It was dark and I was tired and hungry, so I packed it in and went home.
The battery drain issue is a bit alarming
A MacFixIt reader reported a remarkably similar complaint:
"On my Powerbook G4 (15 inch), I installed Leopard and the update. I find that when the battery runs down now, I hardly get any warning, and the computer shuts down and does not go to sleep. Also, I noticed that the date and time get lost, and I need to reset the time and date."
Well, at least my date and time info didn't get wiped.
When I got home, the battery charged up normally from the AC adapter, and I ran the System Profiler to check its status:
Battery Information:
Charge Information:
Charge remaining (mAh): 4888
Charging: No
Full charge capacity (mAh): 4888
Health Information:
Cycle count: 6
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA): 0
Voltage (mV): 12557
Seems healthy, although it is getting a bit long in the tooth, being the original battery that shipped with the unit.
Anyway, it appears that there is a real issue here with Leopard and PowerBook battery charges that amounts to more than just diminished runtime.
The rest of Wednesday evening, I reverted to my normal production routines, the cooling fans cutting in periodically. Safari 3 seems to be the browser that puts the least stress on the processor, and the fastest one too at this stage of the game. It's the first version of Safari that I've really liked, although I still thing the user interface appearance is pedestrian and I don't like the progress Bar in the address field.
I'm getting more used to Leopard, but Tiger is still a lot nicer to use on this machine at least.
Charles W. Moore
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