make a laptop battery last longer

unwashed potato! · 8 Mar 2009 at 23:56

i'll be taking my laptop on holiday in a couple of weeks and wondering if there was any way to make the battery last longer so that it can be used for longer o nthe 9 hour flight.

atm all i do is disable wireless and lower screen brightness but anything else i can try? all it really will be used for is an eBook reader (damn kindle only released in usa) so just run adobe acrobat reader and thats it; anything else that can be disabled can be.

also i doubt it but any chance the headphone slot in planes can be used to power laptops? or virgin having power sockets for laptops?

MotherMayI · 9 Mar 2009 at 00:00

Underclock it?

jeffmango · 9 Mar 2009 at 00:09

Maybe try taking out the cd drive and any other uneeded devices you've got plugged in (card reader, etc)? Might give you a bit extra time.

PhillyDee · 9 Mar 2009 at 01:07

How long does your battery currently last?

asim18 · 9 Mar 2009 at 01:14

Disable antivirus. Go into device manager and disable as much as you dont need.

Mammalian said:
or virgin having power sockets for laptops?

First & Business class on Emirates have 1 power socket per seat, and Economy passengers can request their laptops to be charged. Not sure how it works on Virgin though, could be similar.

int · 9 Mar 2009 at 01:34

Underclock it as suggested, it'll be your biggest power saver. Underclocking my CPU to 40% gives me another couple of hours when viewing documents etc.

bledd · 9 Mar 2009 at 09:34

disable AV scanners etc

my Dell D600 laptop is amazing for battery, you can fit two batteries in it (one slots into the cd drive)

and I have two of each battery, so you can get ~14hours battery life from it

GuruJockStrap · 9 Mar 2009 at 12:40

Notebook Hardware control is a great piece of software if you want to underclock the CPU/GPU. Even lets you play with voltages if I recall.

Greenlizard0 · 9 Mar 2009 at 15:04

Yea underclocking is a pretty sweet way to save juice. My Fujitsu Siemens halves it's CPU speed at the touch of a button by the power switch. Pretty cool feature.

Tomsk · 9 Mar 2009 at 17:45

Mammalian said:
or virgin having power sockets for laptops?

Start here - http://www.seatguru.com/airlines/Virgin_Atlantic_Airways/Virgin_Atlantic_Airways_Airbus_A340_2.php

sketch145 · 9 Mar 2009 at 17:50

+1 for underclocking, my netbook only lasts around 12 hours at full clock speed, but when halved with the screen dimmed and the wifi/bluetooth off it lasts the best part of 26 hours

unwashed potato! · 9 Mar 2009 at 21:01

sketch145 said:
+1 for underclocking, my netbook only lasts around 12 hours at full clock speed, but when halved with the screen dimmed and the wifi/bluetooth off it lasts the best part of 26 hours

26! mine only lasts around 4 hours max with 2 batteries if doing just the basic stuff, with wifi emails etc open around 3 hours

the laptop is a dell latitude x300. little old now though so understandable that the battery isn't very long lasting plsu it's very small. though saying that family keep buying these new laptops and only get like 2 hours maximum from them. cheap laptop or is vista the problem?

thanks for the underclocking suggestion. will download and try the program when next using laptop on weekend and see how that goes. any other ways are also welcome.

was looking at getting another battery but they seem to be around £20 plus p&p so not worth it.

Burnsy2023 · 9 Mar 2009 at 21:14

bledd. said:
disable AV scanners etc

my Dell D600 laptop is amazing for battery, you can fit two batteries in it (one slots into the cd drive)

and I have two of each battery, so you can get ~14hours battery life from it

I must get one of these CD - battery converters for my D600

bledd · 9 Mar 2009 at 21:33

Dell 4R084

You can rip out the DVD/CDRW on the fly and whack it in to charge on the fly

It lets you just rip out battery 1 or battery 2 without warning and plug in a new one. Plus all the batteries have battery charge indicator buttons on them

edit, christ they've shot up in price, mine cost about 15 to 20 quid. a new keyboard (us keyboard) cost me about 12 quid, was like a brand new laptop after this

also, you can buy a chinese sata hard drive converter that fits into the dvd bay, this is my next upgrade for my laptop.

NorthstaNder · 9 Mar 2009 at 22:57

Have a look under the power options too in the control panel. You may be able to throttle the CPU's speed from there.

My Acer laptop has several different power settings available which all use varying degrees of CPU power, screen brightness etc.

unwashed potato! · 14 Mar 2009 at 21:53

thanks guys have downloaded the suggested software and it definetely has made a difference, going from just over 3.5 hours when battery was max for the tasks i was doing to just over 6. of course the battery may still not last this long but it's still an improvement

out of interest say when i'm on the plane and want to take a beak from using the laptop, would it be better to shut down completely or to put into hibernate/standby?

sketch145 · 14 Mar 2009 at 23:18

I'd say probably standby if its only like an hour break, because starting up from cold requires a fair amount of juice.

TheVoice · 15 Mar 2009 at 02:29

Mammalian said:
out of interest say when i'm on the plane and want to take a beak from using the laptop, would it be better to shut down completely or to put into hibernate/standby?

Personally I very rarely do a full shut-down on my notebook, it's quicker and easier to just use Hibernate all the time instead, and it uses no more power when hibernating than it would if it was completely shut down.

Margaret · 16 Mar 2009 at 18:32

Any x64 alternatives to NHC?