Depending on which Macbook Pro you’ve bought and which Macbook Air it’s replacing, the designed battery life may be less right off the bat. According to VMWare’s documentation, VMWare Fusion Pro 8 does indeed allow power users to specify whether integrated or discrete graphics are used. I’m running 7.1 Pro at the moment, and this reason alone may be worth taking the plunge and upgrading to 8 down the road. Meanwhile, the settings you’ve changed are the only graphics-related tweaks I can think of off the bat. Three hours of battery life seems rather low, though. It may be worth testing with a fresh virtual machine just for troubleshooting purposes and/or testing the battery life on your computer in general to make sure it’s not the battery. I’ve been using my Macbook Pro late 2013 now for about half an hour. I have several OS X apps open like Mail, Messages, ReadKit and Skype, but I also have Windows 10 running in VMWare Fusion. I’ve downloaded and updated my version of JAWS using my virtual machine, and have also done some light web browsing. My battery is at 89% with 6:59 of estimated time remaining. That’s probably a little optimistic, but I’d expect to get over three hours for sure.
All this said, VMWare Fusion is certainly a heavy energy consumer, that’s for sure. I too enjoy the freedom of switching easily between Mac and Windows apps, but most of my time is spent in OS X. If Windows truly is your primary OS it may be worth trying to get along with Boot Camp. It seems that there’s a lot of extra resources that could go to your primary OS if it were running natively. Grant On Sep 19, 2015, at 10:40 PM, Jonathan Mosen <[email protected]> wrote: Hi everyone, since migrating from a Macbook Air to a retina Macbook Pro, battery life when using Fusion has been very disappointing. Obviously I'd expect to take a bit of a hit, since I'm running two operating systems at once, but in some cases I am only getting about three hours. It was far better with the Air. I'm looking for strategies to do all I can to maximise battery life as I enjoy having access to both operating systems at once, and would prefer not to Bootcamp if I can help it. Windows is my primary OS though, so I need to try and improve the situation. I've gone into the virtual machine settings and have disabled graphics acceleration. I've also told it not to use full resolution for retina display. I'll ask VMWare directly, but right now their support seems to be going through a system upgrade. One thing in researching this issue is that it would appear VMWare Fusion Pro may be better at giving you control over whether the virtual machine uses the dedicated GPU or not, which I think is probably what's doing a lot of the draining. Can anyone confirm that VMWare Fusion Pro might be a better bet in terms of energy consumption? Thanks a lot. Jonathan Mosen Mosen Consulting Blindness technology eBooks, tutorials and training http://Mosen.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. Grant -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
