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Living Room / Re: better battery life out of a laptop
« Last post by IainB on July 10, 2016, 02:12 PM »@tomos: Thanks for the link, it's an:
Acer Laptop Aspire E1 E1-731-4699, with:
Quite a nice lugtop!
If reduction of power consumption is an objective, then the sorts of things I would suggest you consider could include are, for example:
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!
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...0430_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/fi.../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).
that one had to communicate using the text editing provided, rather than posting an image of the text, so as to avoid unspecified ergonomic problems for readers who had vision problems and/or were unable to zoom their images and/or text. I assure you that I previously had no idea that that was the case.
It's going into my collection of quotations. I think I might speak that phrase to (say) Tolstoy's "War and Peace", or Aristotle's "On Interpretation" the next time one of my hands makes a foolishly instinctive move to pick one or the other up from where they lie collecting dust on their dusty bookshelf. Hmm...I wonder what they might say in response?