Squeezing more juice out of my laptop

June 2, 2006 6:47 AM

How can I optimise my laptop's battery life? Are the things I'm doing helpful?

I have an old and creaky, but fully functional, Sony Vaio laptop. Its main drawback (apart from the fact that it's trying to run Win XP Professional with 256MB RAM) is its battery life - I seem to be very lucky to get an hour out of it, and that's with a new battery. I have been disabling drives and ports I do not use (DVD, floppy, parallel port, mouse port, infrared) and not using the PCMCIA wireless card I bought unless I am plugged in to AC power. I work on files contained on a USB thumbdrive and have taken to copying them to the laptop hard drive and working on them from there, on the assumption that using a USB device uses battery juice.

I use it as a 'satellite' machine for work (main machine is in my home office) and sometimes (on trains etc) would like more autonomy than I can get at the moment. Are the things that I'm doing helpful? Is there anything else I can do?

posted by altolinguistic to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

By running with 256MB of RAM you're likely spinning the HD a ton to swap to it, and killing your battery life. Get 1GB+. Likely, the battery is 2-3+ years old and on its last legs, since they do just wear out and there's not much you can do.

Kicking the display brightness down all the way is much more effective than going through all the trouble you're currently trying. Disabling ports and drives - if you're not truly using them - won't buy you much.
posted by kcm at 6:50 AM on June 2, 2006

Have you tried turning down the screen brightness to the minimum readable level?
posted by Lazlo Hollyfeld at 7:18 AM on June 2, 2006

Check out a program I use called Speedswitch XP. It has a really easy interface for throttling down the CPU. It has a few settings, I usually use "Max Battery" unless I need the power. A nice side effect is that it keeps the laptop cooler, which means less fan noise.

I also second what KCM said, more RAM is a good idea.
posted by svdodge at 7:43 AM on June 2, 2006

Response by poster: It's got as much RAM as it can take, sadly (it had 64meg when I got it). And as I said in the question, the battery is new.
posted by altolinguistic at 8:17 AM on June 2, 2006

Another program that will let you throttle down your CPU is Notebook Hardware Control. It lets you monitor and adjust a lot of things (temperature, hard drive, video card, etc.).
posted by homer2k1 at 8:29 AM on June 2, 2006

Response by poster: It's a PCG F707 (in the UK - might be something different in the US) and is about 5 years old. 8.5GB hard drive of which around 2GB is free - I don't keep much stuff on it. Thanks for answers so far - will try those programs.
posted by altolinguistic at 8:36 AM on June 2, 2006

Best answer: Moving things take lots of power. This means you want to use the hard drive as LITTLE as possible so that ideally it doesn't even spin up at all. The flash USB thumb drive uses a tiny fraction of the power that a spinning HD does, because it is solid state, so you are doing exactly the opposite of what you should be by copying from the USB drive to the HD. If it were me I would be looking into finding the biggest CF/USB drive I could find and doing as much with it as possible.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:24 AM on June 2, 2006

Response by poster: Ah, thanks Rhomboid - that's the kind of thing I needed to know! I am quite ignorant and I've been fumbling in the dark on this.
posted by altolinguistic at 9:42 AM on June 2, 2006