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I think my MacBook Air is sick...

I had it on the charge all night... and when I went to open it up it wouldn't "wake up". I rarely turn it off...

This has been happening more and more frequently.

Also... it's draining battery like crazy. Like I said, I had it on the charger all night last night. I opened it up to use just 30 mins ago and I'm already down to 82% battery from what I can only assume was 100% (I didn't look)

Anyone have any thoughts?

I can't get an appointment at the "Genius" bar until Sunday.

Since I started typing this it's lost another 1% battery.

No idea what it could be but you can take it other places to be looked at too. Unless you want the Genius bar because it's still under warranty.

Yes, it's still under warranty... so any repairs done at Apple are free.

We do have a good relationship with another shop that repairs Mac/Apple products...

But... I like free repairs better.

Can you call the other place? They may have a suggestion or 3 to help you till you can see the 'Genius'.

There are free virus scanners for the Mac. They are getting popular enough that the people who write malware are starting to write for them.

Is your screen brightness higher than normal? That always kills my battery.

Even with a mac, you do need to shut it off occasionally to let it clear temp files and stuff. I try to shut mine down once a week.

With the MacBook Air - yes, if it's still under warranty, take it to the Apple Store. Definitely get an appointment first!

In the meantime, here's a couple of things you could try -

- Reboot it. Especially if you haven't in a while. Could be a rogue process - something that hasn't shut down correctly and is eating up processing power.

- Reset the SMC. You should try to do this before you go to the Apple Store regardless. The URL below gives the entire procedure for doing this. Do follow all the steps in order.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964

- Update the OS if it isn't up-to-date. I don't know what version you are running, but one of the earlier versions of Mountain Lion did cause this to happen.

- I've seen a suggestion to turn off power nap. Son't know if that will help, but it can't hurt.

- If you can, keep it plugged in until you can get to the Apple Store.

Finally - as long as you are still under warranty, call Apple Support. They will walk you through some diagnostics... in fact, one of the things they will probably do is walk you through the SMC reset procedure I gave you. The benefit of doing this is that it will get a trouble call for your machine in the system. If they aren't able to resolve the problem over the phone, doing this will save you a lot of time when you go to take it in. All the basic troubleshooting will have been done, and all that information will be in the system already, so the genius that helps you will be able to start further along in the process.

If you do the support-line call, the tech will probably still run through the basic troubleshooting, but you won't have to answer a bunch of questions - he'll already have all the information in front of him, and diagnosis should take a lot less time.

Thanks everyone...

I did do a reboot - I haven't tried the stuff Oxsgirl said yet... but I will.

Ama! - my screen isn't abnormally bright.

I just took it off charge and it's already dropped to 94%...

I was able to get into a Genius bar appointment tomorrow... so I'll just limp along until then.

Another thing I forgot to mention was to check if there's any runaway processes that might be causing a problem.

The way to see if there is anything like that running that could be causing a problem is by using the activity monitor.

To do that, go to Applications->Utilities and start Activity Monitor.

In the Activity Monitor window, click on "CPU %" to make everything ordered by CP percentage largest to smallest.

Then - see if there is anything using a LOT of CPU. For example, on the MacBook Air I am using right now, kernel is the largest (which is no surprise - that's basically the operating system itself) and it's running between 7 and 12 % for the most part. All I'm doing on the machine right now is using Safari, plus Mail is active and Adobe Reader is running.

If you've got something there using a lot of CPU, then that's probably your problem.

If you see anything in there that looks like it might be causing a problem, feel free to post back here what it is, and I can try to help you get rid of it.

Peermanager and BBlinklauncer seem to be using the most CPU% aside from the Activity Manager itself.

But that said... nothing was using too much CPU %... it shows 95% idle.

Yeah - not familiar with those. Peermanager appears to be associated with Blackberry syncing... I'd guess that BBlinklauncher might also be a Blackberry related item.

Either way, given that they aren't using much CPU, I'm sure they aren't the problem. Sounds like your processes are well-behaved. (Good to know, huh? )

I'd lean heavily towards the SMC needing reset, or a HW problem. It wouldn't be the first time a MacBook had a bad battery!

Good luck!

How did it go at the Genius bar, jrc?

They did a few tricks and resets and basically said they couldn't see anything wrong with it... and if I wanted I could check it in for a deeper probe.

I chose to take it home.