Massive battery life drop after Internet Recovery OS re-install

Question

Hey,
A couple months ago, I made the brilliant decision to try to install Windows 7 with Boot Camp at 3am on a weekend after several days of no sleep (unfortunately, this is one of the least-poor poor decisions I've made recently, but I suppose that's for another forum). Long story short, Og turn on MacBook, Og open Disk Utility, Og click-click, SSD go bye-bye—formatted, every last bit of it (haha, me make pun-pun!). Luckily, ML ships virtually tard-proofed, so there's little I can do besides showering with Bernie (this pun courtesy of the 'lil sis; I'm innocent) to make him breathe his last. This little bit of Apple genius is irrefutable proof of God—praised be his noodly appendage. But ever since Internet Recovery blessed me with Bernie II (R'amen), I've noticed during countless nights lying with him in bed that his stamina has decreased significantly, versus his pre-IR days. I can't give you firm numbers of his endurance before the operation, but now, after even the least vigourous play, he's drained beyond further exertion after no more than 2-2.5 hours. I've tried various tweaks to increase battery life—making sure his mail parts are only shooting off when I work them manually, the same for receiving messages as well, and I've been monitoring his GPU usage; thanks to ML he's much more conscientious about being discrete, and I rarely have to limit him to using his integrated components. (Note: I'm using writing this as an excuse to start an essay, and its foundation really needs to get laid ASAP, so unfortunately the allusions/euphemisms stop here.) Again, I can't give precise numbers about its original battery life, but I was blown away by it, likely averaging at or in excess of the advertised 7-hours. I'm a geek and spent my childhood with eyes never further than a couple of inches from my CRT (and have the vision to prove it), but I really have no f'ing clue what would be causing this. I never doubted that the battery life decreased (and dramatically so), but now that I've started booting up into Windows regularly, any trace of doubt has vanished. Using Windows 8 set on Maximum Performance (and, as I'm sure most of you are aware, Windows only uses the discrete GPU, even when doing nothing graphically-intensive), the battery life is still significantly better than using ML. I've searched and searched and searched and can't find a single reference to this issue online. I'd appreciate any help you can offer. Just in case it's of any assistance, I'll put some might-be-relevant-maybe info below, including things I've thought of that could be the source/contributing to the problem (again, I really have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to true geek know-how):
- It's a rMBP 15" w/16GB RAM
- When I formatted the HD, I wiped out everything. Yes, obviously there was enough on there for the laptop to launch into Internet Recovery, but I'm thinking that was all that was left. When I've been trying to think of why there's nobody online with this issue, something that's popped into my head is that anyone who knows what Disk Utility does is probably savvy enough (when not sleep-deprived) to not use it to format their HD, or at least to heed to the plenty of "Don't click yes, tardums" warnings that I'm sure popped up as I zoomed by them. And I can't think of many other ways for grandma-level Mac users to wipe their HD, so the lack of online info would make sense.
- This was a couple months back, and I can't remember precisely the OS version when all this went down. I'm certain it was ML since I think my rMBP shipped with 10.8.0 (if not 10.8.1, if any did), but it could have been anything between 10.8.0 and 10.8.2. I'm pretty sure it wasn't 10.8.0 since I remember updating to 10.8.1 very soon after purchasing the laptop over the summer, but again, not certain.
Alright, that's it. I'm sure this post doesn't meet forum standards for plethora of reasons, but I'm a poor little private liberal arts university student who is desolate now that his $3,000 laptop isn't getting top-notch battery life, so mods, please dig deep in your hearts and don't delete. Thanks, yous da best.
-Zack

Answer 1

There were a number of posts from folks with various models about a downgrade in battery life after an upgrade to Mountain Lion - so you aren't alone. However, since you're still under warranty, I would take the machine to your local Apple Store or an AASP and have them diagnose the problem. Could be that your battery just isn't up to par (and I'm assuming that you've all updates installed?)...
Good luck,
Clinton