Steam severely decreased laptop battery life

[Name]

When I bought my Macbook this year, I loved how long it would last, maybe 6-9 hours depending on what I did. After I downloaded and installed Steam and playing games, the battery decreased to 2 hours, even when I didn't use Steam. Is this fixable, or would I have to uninstall Steam to make it run the way it did before?

[ZeekAncient]

Just exit out of Steam completely when you are not using it.

[_I_]

find the steam icon in the tray (near the clock)
right click on it and exit

[TechAnalyst]

On my MacBook Pro I noticed that the increase in network activity cost me a slight hit on my battery, but you can decrease birghtness further to offset the difference

[Gazook]

At least on Windows, Steam runs a browser process to display the store, I assume that would be a Safari process in OS X? Sounds very odd that it uses up that much battery just to stay idle though. Do you have a lot of games that are continously syncing with the Steam cloud? That could be it.

[_I_]

and its constantly checkiing for game updates and updating them if needed
or optimizing the games on the drive (defrag)
im sure its doing other stuff in the background too

[FrakMunkie ☣]

Your problem?


>Mac.

[schnitzeljaeger]

Originally posted by zeekancient:

Just exit out of Steam completely when you are not using it.

This. I guess Steam for Mac is optimized worse than the Windows variant ;)

[Name]

I now see what you guys mean when you say "quit steam," as in going to the top left and quitting from there. My battery is better now, and I'll probably just play steam on windows from now on. thanks!

[thescript246]

why u trying to play games on just battery power anyway because u get less power and performance if no power supply is plugged in?

[Drowhunter]

I have a surface pro 3 and the battery life used to be stellar. If it went to sleep at 10% i would come back the next day and it would still be at 10%

With steam left running, i would notice that from my other machine even though the surface was supposedly sleeping.i would get popups from my main computer saying that in home streaming has connected to SURFACE ..

I also noticed that i could fully charge to 100% and close the lid and sure enough when i open it open it the next day to use it i would get the battery dead icon.

Didn't take me long to put 2 + 2 together. So i started exiting steam before closing my lid. and now the battery drain has ended.

[The Giving One]

Wow...almost a 3 year necro. That has got to be some kind of record.