Battery Optimization

I am currently deployed in the military, so doing quite a bit of LONG trips and want/need to optimize my R1 for the 10+ hour long flights I have ahead. So far I have done the following:

Downgraded my driver to the 197 Dell Official so I can use only Intel GPU.
Lowered Brightness all the way down
Disable AlienFX
Turned off CPU Overclock in BIOS

Do you guys know any other things I could do? Is there some type of battery optimization program that gets rid of everything running that isn't required? Any other suggestions? Right now I can get around 6-7 hours out of my little beast... just looking for a little more, I know... I'm greedy

 

Make sure you select the Power Saver power plan under Control Panel --> Power Options settings.

 

Did that as well...

 

Disable start-up apps you don't use (i like codestuff started, but you can just use msconfig, just as good) Disable aero theme. hmmm sadly m11x don't got a decent background app, on my asus EEE i could do backlight all the way down to 1%... would help heaps...

But yeah thats about it that i can think of... Disable wifi and bluetooth if you're not using them...

 

I used the M11x R1 Optimization thread way back when... I used msconfig to disable almost all start-up processes that took up a lot of CPU (all apple, Google's, windowssearch, PeerNet, etc), but that was for gaming mostly. I will dig deeper into them and get them all out I won't need for literally navigating to my video's folder and playing them in VLC using headphones... it's all I do on the flights.

In order to disable Wifi (I don't have BT) would I need to actually disable the wireless card in the "Manage Wireless Devices" window? I never thought of doing that as I figured if there wasn't a network in range, it wouldn't cost any power to run.... Is it like a phone in that it constantly is searching for signal?

 

yeah it constantly scans for it as far as i know...

Just disable them in bios... will be totally off.

Also, if all you want is video playback, you could look into Linux distros, just a basic linux with a video player and some drivers running off a flash drive. I am unsure on how well that would work with m11x though as i would use it on my old asus EEE on long trips just to watch video basically. would outlast windows by a fair bit, probably cause they would hardly use any RAM or any resources...

Again, just something you might want to look into for the future, though optimus and speedstep and all the new stuff might just confuse such basic linux.

 

I have never used any type of Linux, I would have no clue what I was doing...

 

linux does well with nvidia usually - not sure about intel. I would still with windows as I doubt the batt life diff is that great anyway.

There is also the option of those thin notebook sized external batteries. Never tried one so research it first but this might be a way to really boost your mobile runtime.

 

I'm not exactly sure how much of a difference it would make, but getting a lower consumption SSD would decrease your power requirements further.

While active, your WD Scorpio Black uses ~2W, by comparison my Crucial M4 128 SSD uses ~0.15W. While idle, your drive uses ~0.8W while my SSD uses ~0.06W.

 

I have actually been considering upgrading to an SSD, but its not a project I have the time to do while deployed. Also, I have considered upgrading to the M14X R2 (Ivy Bridge) when it comes out, but again, that is in the future. Those numbers are helpful though, I never knew that about SSDs vs HDDs.

 

Thank god you mentioned this, a guy who knows how to downgrade drivers and disable overclock in bios would have no idea there were different power settings..

 

^Fail sarcasm.

In the BIOS, just check off the crud you don't need, for example, the FireWire/IEEE 1394 port, SD card reader and some other stuff I forgot to mention. You really only need your wireless WLAN card and your good ol' USB ports.

The most battery time you can get is 8-10 hours. On the R2 you can get 6 hours max. And on the R3 I guess it goes down even more. Good luck!

 

Common to overlook the simple things and power options by far will have the greater impact.

 

While I appreciate your confidence in my abilities based on the original post, I think that their recommendation to change the power options brought more to this thread than your comments.

 

What are you using for Antivirus? I found a significant difference by disabling the real-time virus checking and going to manual scans. Also use software like "battery bar pro" that will tell you how many milliwatts you are using, try to get that number as low as possible.

 

I currently run AVG Free 2012.

 

I would say that MSFT security essentials uses less power and is less intrusive than AVG Free...

That's just my experience though, so yours might be different, but it might be worth a try!