Messages - eleman [ switch to compact view ]

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26
Living Room / Re: better battery life out of a laptop
« on: July 10, 2016, 02:36 PM »
  • 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)
Wow, this site is awesome. Thanks for all the tips, and in particular, for blackviper.

27
Living Room / Re: better battery life out of a laptop
« on: July 10, 2016, 08:40 AM »
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)

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...

28
Living Room / Re: better battery life out of a laptop
« on: July 10, 2016, 03:40 AM »
Something worth considering is buying a laptop specifically designed for long battery life.  If you aren't very particular about other features you may be able to get a used one cheap on ebay..
Being able to move to an ssd would be a side benefit.
-mouser (July 10, 2016, 03:17 AM)

Uhh... I'm quite peculiar with my hardware preferences. A huge screen, a large keyboard, win7, and a price cap of $400 (really) were the musts dictating the choice. I'm lucky that newegg gave me this one. And I'd rather stick with it, rather than migrate to a win8+ thingie.

BTW, now that I checked the product page again, I realized it has a built-in card reader. Maybe I can use it like a quasi-ssd, to put the hard drive to sleep after boot.

29
Living Room / better battery life out of a laptop
« on: July 10, 2016, 03:11 AM »
I have this huge laptop with a smallish battery and a not-so-mobile cpu. Therefore I get 2-3 hours of use on a single charge. So I'm trying to be creative with increasing battery life with it.

Of course I did all the usual stuff. The screen brightness is as low as I can use. Power settings are very very conservative.

I thought of replacing the hard drive with an SSD, which would consume a tad less power, but apparently the chipset does not like SSDs, so that wouldn't work.

I'm a translator, so my workload is not heavy on the cpu, but every minute or so, the segment I translate gets written to the disk. So the disk never gets to go to sleep; it's always on.

Then, another idea hit me. What if I made a large ramdrive, and worked on that, letting the disk sleep meanwhile, and at the end of the day, copy the ramdrive back to the disk.

Do you think that would help reducing the power consumption significantly? Would it be worth the bother? Or would I be spending 3 hours to configure a system to a much less reliable state, just to get 5 minutes more battery life?

30
Living Room / Re: Goodbye to my father
« on: June 29, 2016, 09:52 AM »
An update:
I just got back from my father's memorial service, which we held in his home of 40 years.
It was much more emotional (for me and others) than I expected.  Mostly I was just surprised at the full life he had and the friends and family who held him in such esteem.

One thing that really jumped out at me was that there were certain things that i paid little attention to during his life -- his writing (he self published a dozen books of stories, novel, etc.) -- took on such significance after his death.

It's not that I didn't on rare occasion talk to him about a particular piece of writing he did that I liked -- but these were very rare occasions.

But after the memorial I couldn't help but think how wonderful it would have been for my father if we had had a day when he was still living, which was just focused on fawning over him and the stuff he made.  I think he would have really appreciated that.

So to all of you who have living parents, my suggestion is, find an excuse to fawn over them for a day, and let them know how amazing they are, etc.

-mouser (June 29, 2016, 09:49 AM)

One of the best piece of advice I heard for a while. Will certainly do.

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