Are there many of you out there who bought this great piece of hardware so that even optimized for battery life it will run the common apps (not games) that I need?
I see alot of threads oriented towards increasing the speed, but I'd like to see my battery life increase from 5 hours to closer to 7 (R2 i7, no OC).
So far the tool I use to test is BatterBar Pro (Currently average around 11.5 watts).
- I've done the obvious, removed Aliensense, disabled wifi/bt (when not using), decreased all the parameters in Win 7 Advanced power.
- I tried using ThrottleStop to DECREASE cpu, but it doesn't seem to impact battery requirements.
- I dim the screen, don't use nvidia
Any other ideas? What works for you?
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In my opinion adding more processes like BatteryBar could potentially give you less battery life. I know the program constantly calculates how much battery life you have which in theory the continuous calculations should use more power.
It is nearly impossible to achieve 7 hours on R2 (i7), at max you can get 5 hours closer to 6 (and thats really pushing it).
A lot of people say Aero doesn't help improve battery life but I beg to differ. If you go into the advanced system setting and under performance setting and adjust for best performance this will disable any graphic effects that helps. When I did this I was pushing 4 1/2 - 5 hours. Also disabling things you do not need in the BIOS could have another small effect but its the little things that add up. Hopefully someone will add optimus support in XP and if so, that will help improve battery life even more.
Another thing to note is only using the barebone services, as well as in device manager turning of devices you do not use. -
Safe mode will do it for you
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Of course its always a compromise... and Safe mode would compromise too much
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My first move was to try some software called "Battery Optimizer" which made some amazing claims, and after spending $30 I find the results FAR FAR less than advertised. So older and wiser I turned to google and tried to educated myself a bit...
What I have found so far, is that there were portions of windows that could be de-installed (Control Panel -> Programs -> Windows Features). Things that (so far) I haven't needed but were installed like "tablet input".
I then turned to the graphics effects (Control Panel -> Performance information -> Visual Effects). Turned them ALL OFF, and switched to a "Standard Windows 7" theme (non-aero).
That actually got me to 8 hours according to batter bar pro... which is far from scientific I realise, but still a significant improvement over the previous 5 hours.
Then I started adding in the few effects that I really liked, which brought me back to around 7 hours.
Now I'm testing too make sure I havent turned off too much...
So there we are, no safe mode, and significant improvement in battery life.
Still working... -
Optimize for Battery Life
Discussion in 'Alienware M11x' started by mikecalva, May 17, 2011.