What is your preferred notebook power plan?

Please state your preferred notebook power plan and the reason behind choosing it. Even if you switch between plans, tell us the plan that you use the most. If you use a custom power plan, please share the settings with us. Please vote and comment. Thank you.

 

I use balance 100% of the time, with a few tweaks to the LCD Backlight behavior and low-battery settings.

I get solid performance on both battery and AC power, and while on battery I get a good 4 hours of battery life.

 

High Performance.... is what I'll set my first to-be-ordered notebook to, as I'll have it connected to a power supply most of the time.

 

I prefer High Performance. What is the point in buying a high end notebook and decrease its performance to get an almost negligible additional battery life? If you need prolonged battery life, get an additional battery!

 

High performance. I'm never far from an AC outlet....

 

High performance when I am on AC and when I unplug I set it to power saver.........you can change them on the fly.

 

I had been using it on Balanced, then switched to High Performance - I'm also never far from an A/C outlet. And, being this is my first lappy, I'm still playing around w/the settings, and such

 

High performance because I'm plugged in most of the time. When I'm not, I switch to battery saver, though.

For each plan I changed some settings here and there, but namely I changed the start menu power button to "shut down" instead of "sleep".

 

download vista battery saver..small application but gives much functunality...
mine is set to HP when it plugged in to AC

 

As I use the notebook around 80% of the time plugged in, high performance is my power plan of choice. I only switch to power saver when its on battery. By the way when the power saver is enable, Vista does not allow to hibernate...why???

 

Tweaked balance power plan 90% of time in conjunction with RMClock to limit my cpu to 1400MHZ and .90 volts on battery and and 1600MHZ at .925 volts when plugged in. I only switch to high performance when I need it. This helps keep the notebook cool and quiet under normal operation. The Core 2 chips are extremely efficient. I don't need the full 2.2GHZ just surfing the net, typing reports, listening to music etc...

 

Are you sure you can hibernate in other power plans? Are you talking about the system automatically hibernating after a set time or you manually clicking on hibernate?

 

Custom settings...

I run XP Pro and therefore have no need for these fancy Vista "power plans"

Disabling unneeded ports and turning down screen brightness will get me something like three to four hours on both of my laptops which is good enough for me. Can get over six hours with a media bay battery.

 

Since my ideal purchase option for processor (the T8100) was not available on the M1330 and I purchased the T8300 instead, I am running a custom power scheme which drops the processor to 2Ghz (ie. set to 90% on Vista) and 50% on battery. Runs much much cooler and the fan hardly comes on. Yeah, Wprime takes several seconds longer, but I love the cool notebook.

 

EXACTLY!!!

 

I've been running the Balanced profile. My concern with the High Performance profile is that the CPU runs at full speed all the time when plugged in so it runs hot and loud which I just don't need all the time. I doubt there is a big hit having the CPU scale... although thinking about it, perhaps that is why I get the odd hitch in NFS MW... hmm...

 

Totally agree with you on this one.

 

What he said.

 

Custom. There are too many settings to copy down, and I'd take a screenshot but unfortunately you can't enlarge the window where you set the advanced settings, so it would require too many screenshots.

I can't see why anyone would switch power plans on battery though, since within one power plan you can customize it do one thing when plugged in and something else on battery for each setting.

 

Thanks for trying to post your settings.

TechSmith SnagIt allows you to take a scrolling window screen capture and save it as one long picture file.

This is what I captured: High Performance Advanced Settings

 

High Performance when plugged in.

Otherwise there's a slight CPU speed ramp-up time and hence task delay when you try to do something. I find it noticeable when opening up a browser, launching stuff, moving windows/programs around.