Maxing battery life?

[TW]Fox · 14 Jun 2009 at 21:12

Hi guys,

I need to max out the battery life on my Dell D620. What sort of things should I disable to conserve power? Obviously Wifi and Bluetooth will be turned off but is there anything else its worth disabling? Onboard USB perhaps? Will that make any difference? Is there anything I can do to force the CPU to run at a much lower frequency?

Obviously this is an addition to the obvious task of reducing screen brightness and setting it to Power Saver mode in Windows 7.

Thanks!

beermonster · 14 Jun 2009 at 23:06

There maybe a bios option to set the cpu to a low power mode, the lcd brightness is the killer with laptops though, everything else will have minimal effect.

MikeHunt79 · 14 Jun 2009 at 23:09

if you have a dvd drive, remove that if you can.

also, set it so the hd disk spins down after a few minutes.

Try not to have too many unnecessary programs running in the background.

CAn't think of anything else right now...

[TW]Fox · 14 Jun 2009 at 23:36

DVD drive already removed and replaced with modular bay battery

If I watch a movie off a USB stick will it allow the HDD to power down and give me more battery life?

PiKe · 14 Jun 2009 at 23:37

Disable any card reader(s) you might have in bios, also the ethernet port if you are not using it.

MikeHunt79 · 14 Jun 2009 at 23:56

[TW]Fox;14284080 said:
DVD drive already removed and replaced with modular bay battery

If I watch a movie off a USB stick will it allow the HDD to power down and give me more battery life?

Yep, a USB stick will use a lot less power than HD, so should give more battery life.

[TW]Fox · 15 Jun 2009 at 00:04

So the HDD will power off with the movie playing from the USB stick? Awesome

MikeHunt79 · 15 Jun 2009 at 00:12

[TW]Fox;14284210 said:
So the HDD will power off with the movie playing from the USB stick? Awesome

It should do if the power options are set properly.

Give it a go, you may be able to hear the HD spin down if you're in a quiet enough room and make sure the mains cable is unplugged.

PiKe · 15 Jun 2009 at 00:14

Replace HDD with SSD for bigger savings

TheVoice · 15 Jun 2009 at 00:23

If it's got a webcam, biometrics reader or anything like that, disable it in the device manager.

There is an app that can undervolt/underclock your CPU, but unfortunately the name escapes me. It's something like RM Clock though.

In my experience (with both XP and Vista), it's very unlikely that the HDD will spin down, especially if you're actually using it for something. Probably better to just have the movie file on the HDD rather than have the system powering a USB device constantly.

MikeHunt79 · 15 Jun 2009 at 00:29

TheVoice said:
In my experience (with both XP and Vista), it's very unlikely that the HDD will spin down, especially if you're actually using it for something. Probably better to just have the movie file on the HDD rather than have the system powering a USB device constantly.

Hmm, what about having a bootable USB stick with Linux and the movie file on? The HD would not be needed at all then.

This may be going a little OTT however...

[TW]Fox · 15 Jun 2009 at 12:05

MikeHunt79 said:
Hmm, what about having a bootable USB stick with Linux and the movie file on? The HD would not be needed at all then.

This may be going a little OTT however...

Not at all, if this is easy to do and yields noticeable benefits I'm up for it!

PiKe · 15 Jun 2009 at 12:19

How many watts does a USB memory stick use in comparison to a HDD though?

MikeHunt79 · 15 Jun 2009 at 12:25

PiKe said:
How many watts does a USB memory stick use in comparison to a HDD though?

I'm not sure, I guess a USB stick will use a similar (maybe less?) power than an SSD as the tech is very similar and there's no moving parts.

Comparison:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hard-drive,1968-10.html

HD uses over 1W, SSD can use less...

If I get time I may be able to measure the power draw of playing an AVI file from a microSD card, if I can find my clamp multimeter...

Emlyn_Dewar · 15 Jun 2009 at 12:40

Remove 56k modem altogether?
Turning brightness down always seems to yield good results but, meh... Brightness is always good.

[TW]Fox · 15 Jun 2009 at 13:01

Emlyn_Dewar said:
Remove 56k modem altogether?

Will disabling it have the same effect?

The only functions I need is the ability to watch movies. Need stuff to disable!

PiKe · 15 Jun 2009 at 13:42

[TW]Fox;14286281 said:
Will disabling it have the same effect?

The only functions I need is the ability to watch movies. Need stuff to disable!

Disable USB hubs that you aren't using, just keep the port you have the flash drive in active, using headphones might help battery life to some degree as the speakers in the laptop might be amplified.

a1ex2001 · 15 Jun 2009 at 13:57

[TW]Fox;14286281 said:
Will disabling it have the same effect?

The only functions I need is the ability to watch movies. Need stuff to disable!

buy a portable movie player, it's what they were designed for?

[TW]Fox · 15 Jun 2009 at 14:08

a1ex2001 said:
buy a portable movie player, it's what they were designed for?

Got overkill?

Incidently is my Laptop supposed to take so long to charge - it takes about 4 hours to fully charge both batteries. Seems a bit ridiculous that it takes 50% of the battery life to actually charge it fully...

Amonlym · 15 Jun 2009 at 15:17

the charge time sounds normal to me. you will probably find tho that both batterys get to ~80% charged in ~1hr, and the last 20% takes 3 more hours, this is down to the way lithium ion batterys get charged.
note, that if your running the laptop hard charge time takes longer (charger rated say 65w. thats the max power it can give to laptop. if its a 65wh battery it could just manage 1hr charge if charging was 100% efficient (it isnt). if laptop itself needs 35w to run, you have only 30w spare to charge batterys = atleast 2hrs now...