I was one of the unfortunate souls affected by the Mac OS X update 10.2.8 snafu. I didn't have any ethernet problems (probably because I use wireless connections almost exclusively), but it did significantly shorten my laptop's battery life. At least I think it did. In all fairness, I could be imagining things, since I don't rely on battery power that much and haven't really timed it since I first got the machine over 2 years ago. Unlike a lot of Mac idiots on the fanboy web sites, I realize that rechargeable batteries eventually die. It's one of the many corollaries of the old "the universe always wins" rule from thermodynamics.

Anyway, it took a bit of work to find Apple knowledgebase article 14449 about resetting the PMU. Anecdotal evidence indicates that this might fix the problem. At the very least, the battery level in the status bar indicates a longer battery life and I noticed that it used to be wildly inaccurate for low charges.

The fan still runs most of the time, which annoys me and is probably responsible for most of the power consumption.