Settings to maximize battery life

Does anyone have suggestions for power settings and/or any other settings to maximize battery life. I want to be able to watch movies on planes (need 2-3 hours) without problems. I would appreciate if you could give me step by step guidance for the power settings. Thank you.

 

I have an xps 16 with ATI 5730 graphics card and 9 cell battery.

 

If you mean standard movie "rips" you will have no problems. The screen brightness will make the most difference but you should be able to pull out 2-3 hours easy.

If it's an actual DVD disk, you will get a little less (haven't tried) but probably more than 2 hours.

As for Blu-ray / HD movies - it will use more power, may not be possible.

 

right. screen brightness for sure. at max brightness, I get about 2.2 hours on 9-cell. At lowest brightness, I get like 4.3 hours.

 

Right now at this moment I'm streaming a 720p HD movie (Star Trek, the new one) over Wi-Fi (11g) at home using my Latitude E4300 with a 6 cell battery (3% wear on it). I pulled the power plug about 1 hour and 20 minutes ago and it's still the Dell "Extended Battery Life" profile (set by the Dell Control Point Manager). The other thing I've done is use RMClock (look at the "Undervolting" Guide thread here at NBR for more info) and I've throttled the Core 2 Duo SP9400 CPU at 800 MHz, it won't go any faster now with that throttle in place.

One might think 800 MHz isn't enough for HD rips but, I'm here to say nope, it works just fine.

Anyway, if you truly want to maximize battery life for viewing movies/videos on a laptop, here's the basics:

- Use the Dell Control Point Manager's profiles - if your particular laptop supports the "Extended Battery Life" profile, that's the one to use, seriously.
- Don't use DVDs at all if possible - "rip" them to your hard drive. The hard drive uses power too but not as much as the spinning optical drive with the live laser beam does... Use HandBrake to convert them to MKV or MP4 files if at all possible, this lets you make them more efficient as well as much smaller with effectively the same visual quality
- Calibrate your battery so you're getting the most battery life you can - and calibrate it at least once every 3 months, preferably once every 2, actually.
- Get RMClock and learn to use it to throttle your laptop to a given clock speed so it doesn't jump all over the place. If you could throttle most modern processors down to 300 MHz or so they'd still play DVDs perfectly, the MPEG2 compression used for retail DVDs is nothing for modern CPUs. I could probably play this 720p HD content at 600 but this SP9400 has a low speed of 800.
- If possible, use RMClock to also adjust the voltages of "normal" operation to ensure you get the very best battery life all the time - my SP9400 has a stock voltage at 2.4 GHz of 1.150 volts, but with RMClock I've adjusted it (requires testing to find the right voltages) to 1.05 so that's nearly 10% less power required - 10% less power required = you get longer run times... undervolting does no damage at all, it just makes your machine more efficient for power consumption
- LCD brightness as low as you can tolerate it
- Unplug any peripherals if at all possible, USB devices, etc

That's about it. I'm still showing nearly 3 hours of battery left (not that Windows is highly accurate, of course, in terms of reading/estimating battery life and run time) but, considering I'm on battery, I'm watching an HD movie, streaming from another machine over Wi-Fi, I think it's working great.

If I had this movie on the hard drive, I'd probably get slightly less battery life than I've had so far since the hard drive presently isn't really doing much (the power profile disabled indexing, etc), the optical drive is powered off, media card slot/Firewire port all turned off by the power profile, pretty cool stuff.