↑ 5.0 5.1 gfxCardStatus, v2.1 by Cody Krieger.↑ 4.0 4.1 gfxCardStatus, v2.0.1 by Cody Krieger.↑ gfxCardStatus Allows Easy Control of MacBook Pro Graphics Cards by Jordan Golson, MacRumors.↑ gfxCardstatus actually working for everyone? by ozreth, MacRumors Forums.↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Commit History - gfxCardStatus by Cody Krieger, GitHub.2010 or newer MacBook Pro with at least two GPUs.Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) to 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion).2008 or newer MacBook Pro with at least two GPUs.Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to 10.7.5 (Lion).Ī fork of gfxCardStatus was created to address similar, though less common, issues in MacBook Pros with Nvidia GPUs. It was identified as a viable workaround to extend the life of MacBook Pro models with failure-prone Radeon HD 6000M series GPUs from AMD by minimizing their use. This version was quickly downloaded over 140,000 times. GfxCardStatus 2.0.1, which added support for 2011 MacBook Pro models with AMD GPUs, was released in March 2011. Users found that manually switching from a power-hungry discrete GPU to the more efficient built-in Intel Core GPU could significantly improve battery life. I’m really dissapointed about how this has been handled and I really hope they come to change their minds.GfxCardStatus 1.0 was announced on the MacRumors forums as a " public beta" in Spring 2010. At the same time, neither Safari or Firefox has this issue so they can’t claim it to be unfixable. I can only summize that the Chromium guys doen’t care about their users. There’s actually an issue about this on the Chromium issue tracker, it’s marked as “Won’t fix”. If you’re interested in gfxCardStatus you can find it here. Big thanks to Cody Krieger for the excellent gfxCardStatus app. Problem solved, I’m back to using Google Chrome again, without any It’s still a myster why the macbook had a hard time going into sleep mode but it seems to have been solved by not using the expensive card while on battery. I guess it’s really more of a workaround than a solution, but it works and it’s now easy to know which card is used. It also allowed me to setup so that the Nvidia card was never used while the computer was running on battery power. Once installed I could see rightaway that the more expensive card was put into action as soon as Google Chrome was started. There’s a free tool called gfxCardStatus which helped me figure my issue. This in turn not only eat a lot of power, but also make it harder for the Macbook Pro to get some much needed sleep, hence the constant power-shortage. You see, Google Chrome uses a feature in OS X that turns on the more expensive Nvidia card, even if it really isn’t doing anything special. After some googling it turned out to be, not my battery, but instead Google Chrome. I was heading off to Gr8Conf in Denmark a couple of weeks ago and thought to myself: “it’s really time I figure out what’s wrong with the battery”. That was something I had never experienced with my old macbook, even when I had left it lying around for a week or so. After a while I noticed that my mac always seemed to be out of power, even when it had been full when I last closed the lid. The next monday I started working at a customer and haven’t really used the mac much since then such is the life of the consultant. A couple of days into the gig my spanking new Macbook Pro arrived I was giddy as a school-girl. This february I started working with a couple of great guys at the small Stockholm-based consultancy Agical. But, I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s take it from the start… That was until it started eating at the battery of my new Macbook Pro. There’s been problems with it now and then, but I’ve been a happy customer most of the time. I’ve been a Google Chrome user for a long time and even ran with Chromium for a while before Google Chrome was released on the Mac. Rescuing my Macbook Pro’s battery from Google Chrome The story
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