An idea on how to improve battery life...

i have a theory that if you frequently defrag your hard drive(s) while your laptop is charging, you will get better battery life while you're on the go. The reason i think so is because your file system is organized. It would put less use on the hard drive which consumes a fair amount of power.

Let me know what you guys thing. Thanks!

 

It might help a bit, making your hard drive seek less. Depends on how intensively you use your hard drive when you're on battery too.

 

Sure it seem like you would get a little more juice, but probably nothing to substantial. I always put my CPU into reserve battery mode and also downclock my GPU, that helps a lot. Nice tip!

 

I doubt it'd make a difference. It depends on whether the harddrive consumes more power when seeking than under normal operation. The thing is, the platters have to spin in either case, and all the electronics have to be powered on. The only thing you save is a small amount of arm movements, and it'd surprise me if that could amount to more than a minute of battery life.

A better strategy is to let the harddrive power down entirely (Of course, that assumes you have enough RAM to run without harddrive access, and of course, more RAM also consumes a bit more power)

 

This guide may help you out

*edit, why is this question in the desktop forum?

 

Yes, get NHC, and set it to enable spindown.

 

Or you could just enable spindown with Windows itself.

 

Yes, well XP Power Options management aside, I just wanted OP to download NHC. It's quite useful.

 

Having more RAM installed also helps battery life as it means you'll hit your hard drive slightly less often. It's faster and more power efficient to access RAM of course.

 

Sorry if the forum I posted in was not what the topic would ideally fit in to.
But, moving parts are usually the first things to die because of duh. Also they generate a fair amount of heat.
To further back-up my issue......look at people who have done an upgrade to 7200rpm drive(s), and more people then not say that it decreases battery life, also generating heat.
If you put your CPU in power saving mode...good...graphics great. Those sometimes and most often have a fan cooling atleast one of them, which also consume more power. To gain power you have to look at what draws the most amount....
Compare undervolting, and speed stepping, defrag the hard drives, all that kind of stuff.

Why does a PDA or smartphone stay charged for longer then any laptop? It has no moving parts. Throw some moving parts in there and things start to add up. Slowing fan speeds / voltage down / undervolting gpu / cpu and speed step, turn off wi-fi, don't use the cd-rom or dvd drive. USB devices consume power also, so no portable hd's on the go. You have to give the usb jump drives and wifi time to get on when you need things.
Dimming your screen......we all know these things, but we need to "apply" what we learn. For instance, if we had 4gb ram drive in our notebook running Windows XP + swap file, and installed other programs on the hard drive....how much you want to be things will not only be fast as heck, but much better battery consumption. If you've seen a computer with a ram drive boot.......it is amazing, and fast. 2gb ram drive, 2gb system memory + 5400rpm hard drive of your choice......

Thats why PDA's are so fast, its a ram drive, no moving parts no wait time
I might be rambling, but this does make sense.
Desktops with too many hard drives have issues starting up if their power supply cannot deal with the initial spin-up of the array of hard drives. You know your hard drive.......you hear it every...****...day.