Disabling Touchscreens and Battery Life

Been searching around and there's not much discussion on this. I have a touch-screen enabled laptop with an option to disable the touch screen in BIOS. Will disabling touch save me a decent amount of battery? Various comments online report a 20% increase, or 1-2 hr increase in battery life. There's not much of a systematic study...was wondering if you had any thoughts.

This was discussed here previously but it's not quite conclusive.

 

How can touch be (hardware) disabled? I do not think it makes a difference one way or another.

But as you have such a device, try using it a few days with similar workloads one way, then the other. That will answer this specifically for your device.

 

As far as I understand, disabling in BIOS deactivates the touch sensor, which is what I would call a "hardware" disable.

 

It may just disable the communications, not the power. Like I said, you have the capability to try it.

 

Disable it in Windows Device Manager. Touch sensor has a minor impact on battery life. I'm not saying it's negligible, more like 5%. It's the darn 4k displays they decide to throw in every laptop now that reduces battery life by 20% compared to a 1080p one. Driving that many pixels has a significant disadvantage in power consumption.

To me it doesn't make much sense. Everyone wants these thin and lights to last all day on battery yet they throw in one of the most energy draining devices in them, a 3k or 4k touchscreen display.

 

The pixel count is the new GHz war imo, so I doubt we'll see it go away just yet. Anyways, if you'Re trying to squeeze more battery life out of your laptop, there are other things I'd tweak befor elike display brightness, etc.

 

5% is pretty significant I would say! I'm happy to get a free 5% increase on my battery from disabling this useless touchscreen.

Yes, I've aggressively tweaked my power saver profiles in device manager; just seeing if I can go further and get a free boost from disabling something that's as useless to me as the bluetooth module.

 

5% over 8 hours would be 20 minutes or so.

 

I have had mine disabled for years, a big waste since i dont use it, I disable it so i can clean my screen without windows freak out.

John.

 

Well.. if you disable the input device in bios, you're only disabling the input device controller. And if you disable it in windows, you're simply disregarding any IO the controller is reading. Doing either is not going to change the power-draw in any way directly (even if disabling the touch-screen scrolling and input "virtual devices" in windows might save some processor spikes).

What would save some power would be a type of touch-screen where you actually can power off the touch-screen matrix, or if people designed an input controller of some sort that didn't rely on having the touch matrix powered. Either capacitive of resistive touch screens can be designed that way, but I'm not sure if they typically are. In any case, having an extra layer in the screen is what draws the most power.

So the other option would be to go with "IPS" matrices where the touch-screen components are placed in the same layer as the crystals. Where it would be much easier to control the power-use, and the input could be placed in the same controller device as the rasterizer. And then you're talking about potentially saving some power -- but like people say, turning off the touch interface itself is not going to make any noticeable difference by itself. They had fairly dense capacitive touch-screens (or a thin layer on top of the screen) that ran on about the same power-draw as a light-diode back in 2000. So I can't imagine it's much more even on a very big screen now. And in any case, the screen brightness on the one hand, and virtual input devices on the other (when thinking about processor load) are a lot more significant.