Ways to extend lap top battery life on Mavericks What are some ways to extend lap top battery life on Mavericks? I've heard that disabling notification center via the terminal can help. I've also had a friend tell me that disabling window animations can make a difference; however, the effect from this seems like it wouldn't be noticeable. Are there any other ways?

Disable Notification Center

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist killall NotificationCenter


Disable Window Animations

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
Disabling Notification Center or disabling those animations won't have any real effect.

The best way to increase battery life is to turn down the brightness of the display. If for example a MacBook Air is idle and the display is set to maximum brightness, the display consumes about three times as much energy as all other components. You can see power consumption information from http://www.apple.com/environment/reports/:

                     off    sleep  idle with display off  idle with display at maximum brightness
13-inch MacBook Air  0.26W  0.69W  1.6W                   6.0W
15-inch MacBook Pro  0.33W  1.09W  8.53W                  15.6W
15-inch retina MBP   0.30W  0.87W  not mentioned          17.2W


You can use top to find processes with the highest accumulated (-ca) CPU use:

top -ca -o cpu


You can see the average CPU use of processes over a longer period by for example adding this line to crontab:

* * * * * ps -eco '\%cpu= comm='|sed $'s/^ *//;s/ /\t/'&gt;&gt;~/Desktop/cpu


Then run this later:

awk -F$'\t' '{a[$2]+=$1}END{for(i in a)print a[i],i}' ~/Desktop/cpu|sort -rn