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better battery life out of a laptop
xtabber:
You can get a 120GB SSD for less than $35 these days and your computer will certainly support it. TRIM is an OS function and is implemented in Windows 7. I have SSDs runnning in older systems with SATA II without problems. It may not run as fast as SATA III, but it will still be many times faster and more power efficient than any HDD. Forget about an SD card - they usually run through a USB 2.0 controller (particularly on cheap systems) and they are much slower than SSDs anyway.
That said, the screen is most likely the major power consumer on that system and I very much doubt that replacing the HDD with an SSD would result in more than a 10-15% difference in battery usage.
Shades:
How can such a modern laptop not support ssd drives?
Reading comments it seems like it does support ssd.
-mouser (July 10, 2016, 07:44 AM)
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It has SATA 2.0, which has only very crude NCQ support, and no TRIM feature, meaning any SSD I put into the thing would not work fast, and also would wear out much more quickly than otherwise :(
Wasting limited write cycles to non-optimized writes...
-eleman (July 10, 2016, 08:40 AM)
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My old Asus P5QL-EM motherboard only has SATA2 ports and I use a Samsung SSD with it. The software Samsung provides with the SSD does enable TRIM. When a SSD isn't reading or writing, it hardly consumes power, that is true. However, it does consume quite a lot when it is reading/writing. A spinning hard disk is much more of a continuous drain. On average a SSD hard disk isn't much more energy efficient than a spinning disk. The 10% number of xtabber is correct in my experience.
Can't you get a bigger battery (with more cells) for this laptop? Or one or more extra batteries?
If you aren't using the DVD, you could actually disconnect it from the main board in your laptop. All what isn't connected, doesn't leech power from the battery...
Use software like 'ProcessTamer' or 'Process Lasso' to keep only the bare essential processes running. Next to the already extreme power conservation settings you have set, that should gain you some more time. Perhaps reducing the priority of running processes helps as well.
IainB:
@tomos: Thanks for the link, it's an:
Acer Laptop Aspire E1 E1-731-4699, with:
* Intel Pentium 2020M (2.40 GHz)
* 4 GB Memory
* 500 GB HDD
* Intel HD Graphics 17.3"
* Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit
Quite a nice lugtop! :D
If reduction of power consumption is an objective, then the sorts of things I would suggest you consider could include are, for example:
* The CPU and GPU might consume less power if the system was configured for battery-saving rather than performance.
* Turn OFF (Disable) all superfluous animations as much as possible (this might even improve performance and reduce response times).
* Go through the Services and prune them as much as you can get away with - e.g., according to Win7-64 (or whatever OS version you have now) settings as per BlackViper: http://www.blackviper.com/
* Disable any "Green" energy-saving/compliance applications - that is, unless you can establish that it actually does something useful for power-saving.
* Install f.lux - https://justgetflux.com/faq.html . Treat it as a suck-it-and-see exercise. It will improve the ergonomics of the display and might even reduce power consumption (less glare/brightness) during night-time use.
* Install BattCursor v1.2.0.0 (http://download.cnet.com/BattCursor/3000-20430_4-75784304.html) and disable existing battery support services. Switch OFF auto-update of BattCursor as there are apparently no newer versions and the author site has gone away, and so update hangs.
* Increase RAM to 8GB (2 x 4GB is max for this laptop). You can get a check on the correct spec RAM to get for your laptop from (http://www.crucial.com/). Increasing the RAM will generally improve the perceived speed of operation of the laptop, and can enable reduced page-swapping to disk, and make room for a RAM disk - e.g., install Virtual Disk ImDisk (http://reboot.pro/files/download/284-imdisk-toolkit/). A RAMdisk is fast and can make a big difference to performance, and consumes less power than a disk, and will generally be faster than either HDD or SSD.
* Disable Hibernate function.
* The 500GB disk is probably a 5400rpm drive. Swap it for a newer, bigger 7200rpm drive. The newer drives are generally more efficient and tend to use the same or maybe even slightly less power, and faster is better for two reasons - the disk is doing more accessing and read/write work in less time, thus consuming less power in total over a given elapsed time, and performance - e.g., as per the WEI (Windows Experience Index) - can be measurably improved. Furthermore, the newer disks tend to create less heat, which can mean reduced cooling fan usage and consequent power drain.
* Install SpeedFan and see if tweaking the fan usage is possible/useful. Don't let things overheat though.
* Install BatteryInfoView from NirSoft (http://www.nirsoft.net). It will tell you the status of your battery. If the battery is poor, then get a second battery. If the battery is good, then, as mentioned above, consider getting a second one anyway, or a larger one - if available (though that will weigh more).
* Examine and tune where possible all the major disk-thrashing proggies and utilities that you might have.
For example:
* You can reduce disk activity on some file search/indexing software - e.g., Everything - by setting it to minimal unnecessary/unwanted metadata collection of files. This also can make it faster.
* Do schedule regular defragging - to run if fragmentation gets over (say) 10%, as this can improve disk performance and maintain it that way.
* Set the TEMP/TMP environment to a Temp folder on the RAMdisk (ImDisk will do this by default).
* Reduce the frequency of Virus/Malware scans.
* Set browser cache to the RAMdisk.
* Set 7zip or other file compression/decompression tools to use TEMP (in RAMdisk).
eleman:
* Go through the Services and prune them as much as you can get away with - e.g., according to Win7-64 (or whatever OS version you have now) settings as per BlackViper: http://www.blackviper.com/
-IainB (July 10, 2016, 02:12 PM)
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Wow, this site is awesome. Thanks for all the tips, and in particular, for blackviper.
IainB:
^^ Yes, BlackViper is an old reliable stand-by. With Win10 though, I don't really need to Disable too many services, just set them from Automatic to Manual.
By the way, I just added a 12th item to my list above.
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