Conserving laptop battery power

Tek7 (Legacy)

Tek7 (Legacy)

CGA & ToJ President
This thread is dedicated to tips for conserving laptop battery power. If you have any tips you'd like to share, please post them here.
 
gamers seem to have a distinct distaste for laptops and will not respond to give tips to laptop owners, if you are looking for tips for yourself it is better to ask then suggest that people give information.
 
vibrokatana said:
gamers seem to have a distinct distaste for laptops and will not respond to give tips to laptop owners, if you are looking for tips for yourself it is better to ask then suggest that people give information.
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Fair enough.

People with laptops: Please post tips on conserving laptop battery power in this thread.

Specifically, I'm looking for tips on a Dell Inspiron E1705 with a nVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 video card.

Here are tips I already know about:
  • Turn off your internal wireless card when not using any online applications.
  • Save the gaming, CD/DVD burning, defrag, and other resource-intensive work for when the laptop's plugged into a power socket.
  • Turn the screen brightness down a bit when you're on battery power.
  • If your laptop has a nVIDIA GeForce Go 7800/7900 series card, go into the PowerMizer settings and set the Battery configuration to "Maximum power savings."
  • Remove any unnecessary USB devices while on battery power.
That's all I've got so far.

Any other tips are greatly appreciated!
 
look up the brand of your hard drive and download that vendors tool and boot of of it and change the settings to maximize battery life.
 
ive noticed that linux usually consumes less battery life then a windows box, particuarly because you dont spend as much processing cycle for the same task, and linux consumes barely any processor when it is idle (<1%). and you can theoretically suspend the laptop, shut it down, then boot back into the saved state.
 
I have found that to be true. In my experience linux gets 1.5-2x the battery life Windows gets. But my laptop gets terrible battery life, 2 hours at the most. Despite this, I don't really know much about conserving the power, mine seems to be less powerful when it's not plugged in.
 
Killerah said:
mine seems to be less powerful when it's not plugged in.
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thats because the processor tries to adjust clock speed to the task needed, unfortunately the current gen P-M takes 15,000 clocks to change the frequency. The best performance/battery is probably the ondemand controller in the linux kernel. when you acutally need some clock it kicks the speed up to 100% then back down when its not needed. the other tools that scale tend to cause performance bottlenecks instead of improving things.

I will mess around with my new apple laptop as it comes in latter this week and post my thoughts :P.
 
My Dell E1705 (performance laptop) gets approximately 2.5 hours per battery (I have two batteries). I'd like to find ways to expand that to 3 hours if at all possible.

I think disabling the wireless card when not in use should boost the life by 15-30 minutes, but that's just a wild guess.
 
too bad you cant switch operating systems :P

besides shutting down non essentials, thats about it. (never leave a rom in the drive, power hogs)
 
hehe just got my macbook, I love the navigation compared to similar windows machines. double finger scroll > side scroll :P

Anyway Im getting nearly 4 hours of battery life :P
 
My Alienware Area-51m 7700 gets 45 minutes of battery life, tops, and it weighs 16 pounds.

On the other hand, I get 160 frames per second in UT2004.
 
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lol does it double for a space heater? I love how with a mac, you install the OS and instantly everything is ready to go. No more 15 reboots to install the OS... of course with linux I dont have to reboot unless I change the kernel...
 
kraniac said:
My Alienware Area-51m 7700 gets 45 minutes of battery life, tops, and it weighs 16 pounds.

On the other hand, I get 160 frames per second in UT2004.
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BROTHER!!!! I've got an Alienware MJ-12 7700. Basically the same thing. P-I-M-P. I love my laptop to death, and it keeps me warm in the winter.
 
if you want your already hot system to overheat... The main culprits of battery draining are the backlight for the lcd, the hard drive and the cpu. the rest of the components dont draw too much, but it adds up.

It might be better to look for something that allows for manual control over the speedstep on the processor. I know of many great ones in linux, but never messed with it in windows.
 
Just got a new laptop myself, so maybe I'll have some ideas in a few months.
My laptop came with a 6-cell, but I have not yet timed how long it lasts. Seems to be on for over 2 hours. May have even made it to 3. But I have yet to watch a DVD or do anything too intensive yet.

What kind of stuff are you doing? You getting 2.5 hours playing games? Or just general web, word processing, type of stuff?
 
SSquared said:
What kind of stuff are you doing? You getting 2.5 hours playing games? Or just general web, word processing, type of stuff?
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Just general web, e-mail, and chat stuff. Any time I want to play a game longer than a few minutes, I make sure I plug in the AC adapter.
 
I get 2 hours or so compiling and running linux off the cdrom. it goes for 3.5 hours recording audio. I have a 9 cell. I have a tool in osx that allows me to adjust my clock. and when i get linux up I can set the clock at will. you just have to note that intels speedstep takes 15000 clocks to adjust the clock speed. that means almost a second of no productivity.
 
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