xp home laptop battery Saving

daggeredge

ok have a Compaq 2100 laptop and was wondering if there was any settings i could change to make it more battery efficient?? The battery only lasts about 2 and a 1/2 hours running pdf viewer (study and stuff) and I find it drains very quickly...

this annoys me as I find I don't like to use it on batteries that often so I plug it in! (I know, i know)which effectively means it charges laptop from about 96% to 100% every time its switched on after being plugged out & plugged back in... (am aware it kills the battery ...have a program called battery optimiser that drains and recharges it every so often)

Any settings I can tweak to prolong battery running time?

my only tweak so far is to change it from 32bit to 16bit color & am not sure does that change battery life??

It has a 2 gig celeron processer (dual speed) that drops to 1.99 on battery - how helpful!!!!

also screen switches off after 5 mins - power options
did not turn off hard disks as not sure as to what this does?

forgive the length of post but I felt I had to explain situation and am getting annoyed about it....

cheers

daggeredge

...oh yeah and I tried googling it but got the usual product ads....yada yada yada

Placebo

well, not much you can do, the more your hard disk runs, the more battery it uses, like dont run your cd drive obviously, maybe try change the amount of programs that load up at startup by going to RUN>typing"msconfig"> then going to thje startup tab, and disabling stuff like realplayer or quicktime or whatever.

changing the look of your xp might also help in faster loading time (i.e less hard drive usage) i might be wrong here and also this probably has min effect, i think if you go into appearence by going into properties (rightclicking anywhere in desktop) and closing down all the effects and changing it back to the way windows used to look, 2d ?

i have a laptop and my battery basically does ditto to yours, it sucks big time.
also my laptop is 2.5 kg. Worse than pcs ?

seanos

In SP2, there one of the 'fixes' they mension, is that they fixed the problem of laptop batteries not lasting long enough, *shrugs*, maybe they set the 'Power_Hog=0' in SP 2?

XDA

Turn the laptop backlight down as far as it will go (or as far as you can live with from a readability point of view.) Usually this can be done via the keyboard, Fn + some other key.

Your celeron should be switching to a much lower cpu frequency on battery, so if its only going to 1.99 then thats not working properly. You should check your manufacturers website for utilities or drivers relating to this. My Pentium M switches from 1.5Ghz down to 600mhz when on batteries.

That being said, 2.5 hours is not really all that bad for most laptops ...

XDA

Duffman

Speedswitch XP is an excellent programme that everyone with a mobile CPU should use. I have a Pentium M (so it might be a bit more effective for me) and using the app extended by battery life by 1 hour+. It allows you to create power schemes and control clock speed manually.. You can set the CPU to max speed when plugged in, lock it to minimum speed on battery or enable dynamic speed switching. Windows XP is poo in terms of power management for Intel Mobile CPUs...

Disable/disconnect any wireless cards and optical drives as they eat battery power in laptops..

daggeredge

speedswitch , eh???

will give it a try looks good.. it's a mobile celeron and as such isn't tested by them but sure can't hurt....

(or can but will reinstall in that case!!)

cheers 4 the linky Duffman and all the other advice, guys!!!
(Wasn't aware the backlight was such a drainer! )

Shuld be interesting too see how much i get out of it!!!
A friend of mine was laughing at me cos he has an ibook and is getting near 5hrs out of it on battery!!!!

daggeredge

ok AFTER running speedswitch I said I'd go to their site :rolleyes:


Apparently there not dual speed as I thought :rolleyes:
even though in the system properties it gives 2 speeds (2 gig and 1.99)

and it says mobile Celerons NOT supported in the forum
(did a CTRL + F for celeron...)
http://www.diefer.de/forum/index.html

Hopefully it hasn't fcuked up the comp, I assume not it looks ok....
Oh well!
Have the screen backlight down a lot so that should help battery says I should get 3.10 hours out of it!!! never happened b4!