Energy Conserving Tips for Laptop Owners
Fri Jul 14, 2006 6:47AM EDT
See Comments (4)
Everyone dreads running out of battery power especially while on the road or when you forget that power cord. So I compiled a list of things that may help you conserve some of that precious battery power. If there is one thing everyone agrees on, is that your screen and hard drive consume the most power, so reduce the settings for these two components while on the road.
- Dim your screen: This is a sure way to save battery power. Just don't dim it all the way. Try dimming your screen to a setting that is comfortable for your eyes.
- Adjust Power Settings: Go to your Control Panel> Performance and Maintenance >Power Options to adjust your settings. Choose the Portable/Laptop power scheme to minimize your use of power.
- Recharge your battery: If you are at an airport or coffee shop with available power outlets, plug in your notebook until you have to get back on the road again. Find out if your plane has power outlets too.
- Leave a disc in your drive: TechiWarehouse suggests you leave a disc inside the CD-ROM drive it drains less energy when the system finds one than to search for one.
- No Wireless: Turn off your wireless card if you're not connected to a wireless network.
Guide to Green Living has more tips like using standby and hibernate, exiting unused programs and turning off sounds.
I know you tech-savvy Yahooligans have more energy conserving tips for laptop owners, care to share them with the rest of us?
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2 Posted by platinumgryphon on Thu Sep 3, 2009 8:14PM EDT Report Abuse
I personally disagree with leaving one's CD in the drive. If your system is issued a specific command that involved activating an installation or running some thing that has accessed from a specific location, your comp will search all drive available. Having your CD mindlessly spinning for no reason wastes ALOT of power. For thoes of us Kids who used to use CD Player Walkmans before MP3s, yeah, we know that all to well. I've used a laptop ALOT and it is now 4 years old with a worn out battery that only lasts half as long as its supposed to. This is what I would add to the tips: Botting your system is evil on power. Your laptop is sure to have BIOS setting that can tell it exactly what to do when booting. One of them is a complete hardware check. Turning this off have saves LOTS of booting time by bypassing that step safely. Turning off certian Drives you dont need helps. Unplugging them, just like the Wireless was mentioned helps alot. DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CD IN THE DRIVE. I don't know if I can stress that enough. When your computer boots, on the boot list IS YOUR CD Drive. If you Leave a random CD in that drive, your comp will detect it and search it for anything it needs during the process, wasting maybe more power than your hard disk in my opinion because it starts spinning well before and after Windows is booted on my XP system. Another option is to actually use that boot method and disable booting from the master drive. Going mobile, totally; booting from your CD. Nice if you have lots of RAM; dont do it if you dont however. Buy a BUTTLOAD of RAM. Reduces the usage of your page file and that darned HD having to constently swap and access files you're using regularly and actively. Laptop Cooling Pads are rather hard to forget. Buying ones that simply run off your USB is good. While you do cost some power in running it slightly, if it keeps your Lappy from getting to hot 30 minutes down the road? you're way better off. Reduce the Usage of your Video Card. Lowering Resolution helps because your Video Processer will not need as much power to get the job done calculating Visuals. Turning off Fades and reducing your Desktop Effects will help also. Make Sure your back ground processes are cleaned. I don't recommend this but if you bring up Task Manager on Windows and go to Processes; I garuntee you will find things running and wasting CPU power that you dont need. The Delete Button completely halts the Process highlited. There are programs however that clean your processes in a much more safely manner, I would'nt recommend my way, it's rather primitive and can cause system errors if you do not know what Process are needed to keep your system Stable. Try to keep your computer from searching its drives to find what ever your need to run. Locate it for your system Manualy by using the Run and typing in the Paths; or if you're installing; and your system asks if you have Media? Locate it specifically and manualy, do not let it search.
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3 Posted by william112290 on Thu Sep 3, 2009 10:46PM EDT Report Abuse
the cd rom drive and processors consume as much energyif you are looking for battery life dont get a laptop with a pentium series processor. the Amd's consume far less energy.
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4 Posted by richlenejoannides4xmom on Mon Aug 14, 2006 7:48PM EDT Report Abuse
if your in a car, invest in a dc to ac adapter so that the laptop can charge in the car.also, if you have a removable drive, especially in the dell notebooks, take it out so less power is consumed. mp3 players or anything else that are fully charged should be taken out as well
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1 Posted by bobstites on Thu Sep 3, 2009 3:10PM EDT Report Abuse
It also helps to turn off your firewire. I never use mine, and have it disabled at start up (you can enable it if you ever need to). Bob