Maxing the battery life of Studio 17

Im on holiday in the next couple of weeks to South Africa to visit my parents. The only problem is it a 11hour flight during the day, so sleeping isnt an option.

I am strongly considering taking my laptop onboard to try and kill off a few hours especially as i have a good 100gb worth of films & series on it, but i want to try and squeeze every last drop out of the battery!

I will obviously be turning the brightness right down and turning off the backlit keyboard, aswell as wifi etc, but is there a way to drop the cpu speed to 15-20%, or whatever the laptop needs to run a film?

I wont need the full 17" screen, is there any way to turn off 3/4 of it so that i am only using a portion of it? if not is there any colour to use as the background that wont draw as much power, as im guessing fullscreen will draw more power.


Can anyone else advise any power saving tips that could extend my battery life to as long as possible?

thanks guys

 

If you ain't done so already, undervolt the thing. You can lock it down to some of the lower multipliers, too. Then, disable any hardware devices you won't be using: Ethernet, WLAN, BT, etc. I don't know of any way to turn off parts of your screen, but I think a solid black background is supposed to consume slightly less energy than others (I'm actually not sure about this one; I don't actually think it's true?).

You may also want to look into an extra battery or some sort of airline adapter.

 

Iv looked into other batterys but at £30-50 its a fair amount of money. How do i unlock the Dell bios so i can undervolt it? i never thought of that, thanks!

Will also look into disabling all the hardware jobbies i wont be using.

 

You don't need to unlock the Dell BIOS. Just use RMClock. You can also be daring and try a BSEL mod, but I don't know too much about 'em.

 

Thanks for the advice, iv had a look at RMClock but i dont think it works with Windows 7 (64bit), as it wouldnt detect my memory. I couldn't find any options to undervolt the CPU either?

I dont spose you could shed a bit of light on it could you? thanks


If anyone else has any tips id appreciate it!

 

Have a look at the Undervolting Guide in the Hardware forum here. I've been using RMClock on Windows 7 RC 64 bit for over a month now.

 

#1. right click on the power settings on the bottom right of the screen, and click on Dell Battery Meter. Then Click on Enable Dell extended battery life.

what this mainly does is disable the Bluray/CD/DVD-RW drive, even if your not using it, some power goes to it waiting on you to insert a disk and detect it, This kills the drive until you re-enable it.


#2. Restart go into Setup OPtions, F2, and disable in the Bios the WIFI catcher, this eats up power, and Disable Bluetooth 2.1 at the Bios level

#3. If you have $30 and want to add an extra 30 minutes of battery life buy this 2GB Intel Turbo Memory and pop it in yourself it auto detects and works

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQZo36FTQmQ&feature=related

(basically search around, speeds up the system a bit, because 1GB acts as internal Ready Boost, and the other 1GB acts as Ready Drive, basically adding 1GB cache buffer for your HDD, saves battery because your HDD works less) Cheapest and best upgrade you can make to any Laptop which accepts it. 2GB Intel Turbo Memory get a 2GB chip, stay away from anything less, or anything more double the cost will not equal double the benefit.

#4. Get a AA powered Laptop cooler, it keeps your laptop cool, so your fans won't waster energy spinning up.

#5. Get a SSD drive if price is not a concern.

 

Where did you download it from? I think the version iv got doesnt work with Windows 7 64bit. I get an error message saying
''cannot load or install RTCore64 driver. Make sure you're loading this app from not a read-only medium and/or a network drive, and that your logged in as an admin..''

thanks for the advice guys!

 

The Undervolting Guide thread has a 64-bit Vista driver that you need to install, at the very bottom of the first post. It's a small ZIP file containing rtcore64, and you just drag and drop it over the existing rtcore64 file.

EDIT - I just typed "Undervolting Guide", and the forum automagically made it a link to that thread! What is this witchcraft?