Now I don’t feel myself as a the only watt killer dork on earth, really.
By the way, I use Dell Latitude D810 with a 60W Adapter with the pin purposely broken.
This serves two purposes: Firstly, instead of using 80Watt default charger, I killed some considerable watts in using a smaller Watt adapter ( heck, already considering hacking a 50W Compaq charger ). Secondly, the battery charges only if I use the Normal default 80 Watt charger with middle pin intact. I have a habit of only charging battery if the capacity is about 10%.
By doing alittle of this mess, I killed watts, and prolong the battery life . CMIIW
You know in my country , the PLN (national Electricity/Utility Corporation) is infested with major corruption so we love to hate the blackouts through the years. Leaving the battery attached to the battery is critical for uninterupted computing needs.
hey guys. i just wanted some information. please do help me out. I have a laptop 768 MB RAM and graphic display or 64 MB and 1.60 Ghz processor. how much power would it consume assuming at full speed and full lights on? see i’m trying to have some of my electronic devices work on solar power and am rather keen on doing some environment friendly acts ( apart from cutting my bill ). And knowing my country, solar stuff is pretty new here…
Putting your hard drive to sleep isn’t worth it. Ever. You save a whopping… single watt. Why bother?
Wait. Putting your drive to sleep, saves you almost 14W of power, not just a single watt… Note: cpu idle uses 15W of power, which is the state your computer would be in, were it not in sleep mode.
Also - as a matter of saving your battery life, since every battery has a life determined by the number of times it is completely discharged and subsequently recharged.
Whenever you have access to a power outlet, plug your laptop in. This way the battery doesnt get discharged, thus prolonging your battery life.
I think the most power hungry parts in today’s notebooks would be the central and graphics processors, followed by the display panel, then the hard disks, and finally wi-fi.
However, today especially we now have better graphics options available to us. nVidia and ATi have done some good work with their chips and their latest chips offer extremely reliable power management. Almost too reliable, as the difference between running at low power or maximum performance can be felt!
I had riva tuner running once to observe the temps and clocks of my 8600m GS. I had a screen saver running to get the clocks back up to maximum. Over time as the screen saver was the only thing running, riva tuner started reporting drops in all of the graphs (core, shader, memory, temp). After I had backed out of the screen saver and left the desktop to idle with no programs running, the graphs went down again.
550/1100/400 60c
250/500/200 55c
125/200/100 45c
My notebook gets me roughly 2hrs 45mins. I hardly game on it, if ever. I HAVE tried COD4 UT3 and Bioshock. UT3 runs the best (45-60+FPS), followed by COD4 (20-60+FPS) and last Bioshock (20-30FPS)
HP has its own specialized power plan called HP Recommended, but it’s pretty much equivalent to Balanced. It cuts display brightness down to 37%, which is still pretty good. And the CPU can run up to 100% if it needs to, but it pretty much always stays at a less FSB and multiplier than stock. And my HDDs are 5400rpm 8mb SATA 150. They get a WEI score of 4.6 (I’ve tried them both out as the Boot HDD).
surely aruj is right. I dont see how sleeping doesnt save 13 Watts. I feel I must be wrong because thats a lot of people to make a simple mistake otherwise.
Article is out of date, needs a refresher? For example, most modern CPUs these days use far less power at idle, where the majority of CPU use will remain.
Great Article.
I am thinking of purchasing the xps 1330 and while configuring it am wondering if more memory and speed will mean less up time while on batteries.
I would love 4gb of memory and internal video card and more cpu but it seems for more power on the go I need to forfeit some power.
Anyone have some proven information on this?
Seems integrated graphics is not the way to go in any case, cpu can always be clocked down so shouldnt stop me from getting as much as I want but I havent found any info to help me decide if to go for 2gb sdram to save on power or if getting 3 or 4 gb will not mean less battery time…
So, a more energy complacent thread here. I would NEVER put my laptop on sleep - even before exactly knowing about THAT whopping single watt. I would alwayz hibernate when im roaming around, and that would cut me off. When @ home, I have tried some of the energy saving equipments in the market, and generally satisfied with the one im using right now from this company:
Other than that I would also make sure that the Power Saver mode is on, and dimming the LED would generally save me for 3 hours while im roaming with my Benq laptop.
Good article and u did great job by doing this experiment. I like your approach and vision but the modern processors used less power like HP have their recommended power plans.
