Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

better battery life out of a laptop

<< < (4/6) > >>

eleman:
Wow, I added 30% to the battery life, without a single hardware change...

Just changed the background of the translation software (which I run full screen) from white-grey to black-blackish. Now the battery lasts roughly 4 hours instead of the previous 3.

Ath:
Check this out: blackle

f0dder:
Don't even consider running editing on a ramdrive - it's simply too much grief if you lose your work. There's a good chance there will be enough background I/O anyway that your main drive wouldn't spin down... aaaand they don't even use that much power.

Screen is definitely the biggest power drain, especially when you're not running anything compute-intensive - the hardware change that would be most likely to get you more battery life would be, well, the battery :) - especially if the computer is more than a couple of years old. Batteries wear out over time.

A SSD might be a good option - you might not get much extra battery life out of it, but it's a big quality of life thing. Less noise, faster program startup, much reduced vibration (nice if you use the laptop in your lap). And do be careful to check reviews first: in laptop situations (especially when it's been possible to spin down the disk), some brands have actually ended up being more power-hungry than traditional disks. Don't worry about NCQ as you're not doing disk-intensive stuff, and this also means you shouldn't really worry too much about TRIM either (do chipsets really have to support it? I thought it was just pass-through to the drive, and the support was tied to OS).

IainB:
Wow, I added 30% to the battery life, without a single hardware change...
Just changed the background of the translation software (which I run full screen) from white-grey to black-blackish. Now the battery lasts roughly 4 hours instead of the previous 3.
________________________
-eleman (July 16, 2016, 02:09 AM)
--- End quote ---
That's interesting. Intuitively, that's what one would expect. I do most of my reading in the Bazqux RSS aggregator (on my laptop), with the display set (via NoSquint) to phosphor green on a black background (that's real easy on the eyes, and very easy to read), and those websites that I tend to use the most I have set so they are displayed as black-on-grey background.
So I will probably be reducing power consumption by the screen display, in those cases. I would like to have some data on that, but have no real way of measuring it.

IainB:
1.  ...Don't even consider running editing on a ramdrive - it's simply too much grief if you lose your work. There's a good chance there will be enough background I/O anyway that your main drive wouldn't spin down... aaaand they don't even use that much power.
____________________
-f0dder (July 16, 2016, 03:40 PM)
--- End quote ---
Hmm. I think you may find with most RAMdrives nowadays that stability is probably not an issue - unless the OS is unstable, of course.    :D
A good example would be using a dynamic RamDisk with (say) ImDisk Toolkit. I've been trialling that for a few months now, and it has performed superbly. It's a simple set-up-and-forget service, and quite trouble-free.    :Thmbsup:

2. ...Screen is definitely the biggest power drain, especially when you're not running anything compute-intensive
____________________
-f0dder (July 16, 2016, 03:40 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yes. I've always assumed this to be likely, though I didn't collect any data to back it up.

3. ...the hardware change that would be most likely to get you more battery life would be, well, the battery :) - especially if the computer is more than a couple of years old. Batteries wear out over time.
____________________
-f0dder (July 16, 2016, 03:40 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yes. A failing battery is a PITA. A new/second and/or larger capacity laptop battery is a worthwhile investment and reduces such annoyances. Extends the happy/useful working life of the laptop and the user experience too.    :D

4....A SSD might be a good option - you might not get much extra battery life out of it, but it's a big quality of life thing. Less noise, faster program startup, much reduced vibration (nice if you use the laptop in your lap). And do be careful to check reviews first: in laptop situations (especially when it's been possible to spin down the disk), some brands have actually ended up being more power-hungry than traditional disks.
____________________
-f0dder (July 16, 2016, 03:40 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yes, I would intuitively expect shorter start-up times for SSDs, though never having used an SSD I wouldn't know for sure. An improved user experience would probably be the telling factor there.
However, I do wonder what hard disk drives you have had that reduced your QOL by vibrating or being too noisy.    :tellme:
I mean, I have never experienced such problems on a laptop hard drive (even failing drives), over the years. It's generally the fan(s) that will tend to vibrate and/or become too noisy, because the heat-exchanger is clogged-up by bits of airborne fluff and flakes of dead skin to the extent that the waste temperature rises through lack of adequate cooling, so more power is fed to the fans to improve the cooling. Taking apart and thoroughly cleaning the heat-exchanger grill, the fan enclosure (and the fan blades too), and a shot of CRC on the fan spindle usually transforms it into a cool and as-good-as-new state, believe me.    8)

Oh, and for a cool-running, long-lived and more trouble-free laptop, DO NOT rest the laptop on fabric or on your lap! Place it on a smooth surface (e.g., a tray) which is resting on your lap or on some fabric, and place a 1½-inch long pencil eraser in the centre under the back edge of the laptop (try it out). There's minimal restriction to the airflow that way (and see above re fluff, etc.). Be kind to your laptop.    :-*

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page