Without Battery, MacBooks Take Big Perfomance Hit

Ever run your MacBook or MacBook Pro without the Sony vgp-bps8 battery installed? Most people don’t, but some notebook users pop them out when their systems are running on AC with hopes of extending the life of their vgp-bps9a/b by a few months.

While I was benchmarking third-party RAM with a dell xps m1330 battery this week, I noticed that the computer was taking a huge hit in performance when it wasn’t running on Apple-supplied memory. A minor decrease in performance might be unlikely, but a 37 percent plunge in processing power seemed impossible. After some backtracking, I realized that I had been running the benchmarks without the battery installed after I’d swapped out the stock RAM for third-party memory. The MacBook Pro dell xps m1530 was running off AC power for both tests, but the battery was installed only while I was running the benchmark with 4 Gbytes of stock RAM.T60p

After some digging, I found that the performance drop is documented on Apple’s support Web site–though honestly,bps10 Apple’s reason for forcing a drop in processor speed doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Apple justifies the speed reduction by explaining that it “prevents the computer from shutting down if it demands more power than the A/C adapter alone can provide.” But what happens when a battery is no longer able to hold a charge? Does the processor speed drop in that case as well?vgp-bps9/b

We benchmarked our 2.53-GHz MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM using Cinebench R10’s multiprocessor test,vgp-bps9 and achieved a score of 5,549 with the battery present and 3,504 with the battery removed.

Lesson learned: The battery stays in. If you’re a MacBook or MacBook Pro owner,IBM laptop battery you’ll get the best performance out of your system when you leave the battery in. A small extension of your Dell laptop battery’s life span is not worth a 37 percent drop in performance.batteries

If you’re operating a MacBook or MacBook Pro system with a dead battery,hp laptop battery I invite you to benchmark your own system: Try testing your notebook with and without the dead Pavilion DV8000 battery installed.dell inspiron 1525 battery You can use a free download of Cinebench R10 to benchmark your Apple system. Be sure to close all applications and disable Airport and Bluetooth before you run the test. And please let us know your results as a comment below.acer laptopbattery