Battery Conserving For Airplane

Laquer Head

Laquer Head

Well-Known Member
I'm going to be on a 5 hour flight at the the end of this week and I am wondering what is the best way conserve my battery power--while still being able to read over text docs, and play some solitaire..etc.

Typically I get over 2 hours on a full charge when my settings are all on high performance and I'm doing internet, photo work, watching vids..etc.

I can put the battery to power saver mode which darkens the screen alot and choose for it to sleep after a certain time...

but are there any other things I can do to help sqeeze extra juice from it for periodic use over this flight?

The laptop specs are in my sig.

Thanx
 
Turn off wifi, lower the brightness of the screen, set any power management settings in Windows to the 'conserve battery power' state.

You could just get a macbook and get 8 hours of battery life, lol :P:D
 
tlarkin said:
Turn off wifi, lower the brightness of the screen, set any power management settings in Windows to the 'conserve battery power' state.

You could just get a macbook and get 8 hours of battery life, lol :P:D
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Cool, thanks for those tips--

--

As for the Mac suggestion--I'm not about to spend 2000+ on a Mac just to get good battery life!:)
 
If you really need extended battery life you can buy an external battery. They're relatively cheap and can help add many hrs of battery life. The only downside is that they're pretty heavy.
 
High performance and power saving mode don't really do a thing other then dim the brightness and determine when to put the computer to sleep. I would disable the wireless card, bluetooth, and any devices you aren't using (NIC, serial, etc.), set the brightness to the lowest possible setting that you are comfortable with, and when you are in the power settings page, change the advanced settings to make sure that the processor can throttle back the speed when it's not needed.
 
[-0MEGA-];1458627 said:
High performance and power saving mode don't really do a thing other then dim the brightness and determine when to put the computer to sleep. I would disable the wireless card, bluetooth, and any devices you aren't using (NIC, serial, etc.), set the brightness to the lowest possible setting that you are comfortable with, and when you are in the power settings page, change the advanced settings to make sure that the processor can throttle back the speed when it's not needed.
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Okay thanks OMEGA!

As for the last part you mentioned--I think my mobile Core i7 runs at 1.6 when its not under load..and overclocks as necessary--is this what you mean?!
 
Laquer Head said:
Okay thanks OMEGA!

As for the last part you mentioned--I think my mobile Core i7 runs at 1.6 when its not under load..and overclocks as necessary--is this what you mean?!
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There was another setting I remember seeing that stated what the lowest and highest percentage of processing power was available, by default it might have been 50% for the lowest, you can try lowering that and see if it lets you downclock even lower.

Although it's a bit unrealistic to expect to gain an additional 3 hours of use by some tweaks.
 
[-0MEGA-];1458640 said:
There was another setting I remember seeing that stated what the lowest and highest percentage of processing power was available, by default it might have been 50% for the lowest, you can try lowering that and see if it lets you downclock even lower.

Although it's a bit unrealistic to expect to gain an additional 3 hours of use by some tweaks.
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True True--I'm just hoping to be able to periodically use it to just read word docs, and play card games..

in between naps!! LOL
 
I really don't see disabling non used hardware is going to save you any battery life. If you simply turn off blue tooth in the software it won't broadcast. Also, your NIC, if not connected doesn't really do anything. The subsystem service that would access such hardware also only ran when needed, so it would maybe save you 0.000000000000001% of battery life I assume.

Look at your BIOS settings for advance power management, as a lot of it is controlled on the firmware level.
 
tlarkin said:
I really don't see disabling non used hardware is going to save you any battery life. If you simply turn off blue tooth in the software it won't broadcast. Also, your NIC, if not connected doesn't really do anything. The subsystem service that would access such hardware also only ran when needed, so it would maybe save you 0.000000000000001% of battery life I assume.

Look at your BIOS settings for advance power management, as a lot of it is controlled on the firmware level.
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Usually there are switches on the laptop for disabling WLAN and BT, and granted disabling anything that you aren't using like NIC's and such won't do much, if you are trying to squeeze every bit of battery out of your laptop, it won't do any harm. :)

Also, make sure that your battery is at 100% before leaving. Most laptops won't complete the charge if the battery is above 95%, so discharge a bit and then charge it fully to get every extra minute out of your battery.
 
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