Superclean Install - 9 Hours On A 6 Cell Battery

UPDATE: Cheat sheet to the superclean install posted
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4668946&postcount=27

I am currently experimenting on seeing how far beyond the manufacturer's specifications I can take my machine. I'm keeping track of the steps I've taken, and will update this post when I feel I've reached the limits of what this machine is capable of doing, along with exact steps on how to reproduce my setup. Here's what I've currently achieved:

- A maximum of 9 hours of battery life on a 6 cell battery using 6.5 watts
- 6.5 hours of typical battery life while browsing using 8.5 watts
- No audio stuttering/crackling and perfectly green DPC latency
- Super quiet operation with no fan noise (fan stays off and doesn't spin)
- CPU temperatures around 33 degrees, rest of computer around 40 celcius
- Roughly 25 seconds to reboot to a working desktop (not just login screen)
- Only about 0.37 gigs of ram being used when idle

Machine specs are Dell Latitude E6500, Intel P8400 CPU, Intel X4500MHD Graphics, 1440x900 WXGA+ LED Screen, Corsair 128 Gigs SSD, 1.5 Gigs RAM, Dell 1397 Wireless, Dell 370 Bluetooth, DVD RW Drive, Webcam, Backlit Keyboard, 6 Cell Battery, Windows 7 Beta Build 7000.

 

Wow, no downclocking of the CPU/GPU? Also, 1.5 gigs of ram is odd?

 

This is at standard default voltages with no downclocking/throttling or any CPU power tricks. RMClock is just used to show the power consumption.

Everything in the machine is stock except for the memory and the drive. 1.5 gigs is temporary (1 gig stick and a 512 meg stick in there at the moment) until I upgrade it to 2, 4, or 8 gigs (haven't decided yet).

 

it does look promising alrite-any idea when could we expect to take a glimpse on your doings?

 

Hopefully within a few days. I have a few more ideas I'm going to try out and each idea takes a while due to the system restore, install, test, and uninstall cycle I've been following.

 

Very interested in hearing how you did this.
On a side note, do you manually turn off WIFI to save power?
If so, how is that done exactly?

 

The first screenshot with the red X on the wifi tray icon was with the wifi off. I did that by flicking the hardware switch on the right side of the machine to the off position. This shot was also with the screen at the lowest brightness setting. 6.5 watts was as low as I could get it so far, but that's still an amazingly environmentally friendly power draw.

The second screenshot was with both wifi and bluetooth turned back on by flicking the hardware switch back to the on position. I also boosted the screen brightness to the 3rd notch which I find comfortably bright on the eyes. The screen I have is almost eye searingly bright at the full brightness setting so I never have it that high. With these changes power draw went up by 2 watts. I do not manually turn on and off the wifi. I just keep it on while I use the computer to get typically 6.5 hours of battery life.

 

6.5W is impressive. I suspect that the SSD helps. in reality it is rare for HDDs to power down when a computer is running because background processes tend to access the disk.

By the way, Alt+Fn+Prt Scrn captures only the active swindow, so there's no need to capture the whole display.

John

 

The SSD is definitely helping, that's for sure. Thanks for the tip, I've actually been manually cropping the images in Paint so far, so that will save some time.

Anybody know how to get a screenshot of the bios settings? I'm thinking of including bios screens too in my writeup, but not sure how people manage to capture those.

 

For bios screen shots a digital camera works well. That is the only way I know to do it.

I am interested in your configuration. I have almost the same set up, including the Dell 1397 Wireless card. The Dell wireless card is the only thing that gives me latency spikes about once a minute. So I'll be interested on how you were able to get rid of the spikes with the dell wireless card.