Help me extend my battery life on Acer Aspire 5685 ... T7200, GFGo 7600, 2GB....

Hi folks,

Just purchased my 1st ever laptop an acer aspire 5685 WLMi for 700quid (a bargain IMO). It has 7200processor, 2GB Ram, 15.4" WS, 160GB HDD and loads of other bits and pieces (webcam and battery life are lousy though!!).

Does removing cr*pware save me any battery life??? I intend to optimise this laptop according to the dummies guide in another thread on this site... will this additional step save further battery life also?

I intend once all this "software optimisation" is complete is to then hopefully undervolt the 7200 cpu with RMClock which should also save an additional 20% on battery life if done right according to another website I googled. Just that 2 1/2 hrs is a bit lousy and I am trying to improve the lifetime at minimal performance cost!

I am also thinking of 2 more steps (1) Once I have got rid of the acer cr*pware hopefully there will be more system memory available such that I can turn off the virtual memory page file (accessing hdd uses power) and maybe use a memory optimisation utility like cacheman/cachemem? (2) Also thinking of doing something about the gfx card undervolting etc or maybe just simply updating the forceware drivers (do the new ones save any power?)

Enough said ... tips appreciated .... When finished I may post up a "to do list" for optimising an Acer 5680!

Thanks
Jules

(I have also posted similar message in the Acer thread! Don't shoot me!)

 

I don't think removing the bloatware itself will help with the battery life. The undervolting should help though. But in any case...2 and a half hours with a GO 7600 isn't lousy at all. The X1600 and 7600 are comparable and I'm getting barely 2 hours.

 

Just that I am a fussy about wanting to use it for surfing and reading ebooks as well. I know it can be used as a "gaming" laptop though it will not be a primary reason for it. I got this laptop cheap and the compromise on my part was the battery life, so I am trying to "alleviate" this compromise.

Jules

PS I reckon the disabling of virtual memory will save a bit of battery (eliminating HDD access) provided I optimise memory.

PPS I agree "undervolting cpu looks like "primary" candidate for extending battery life.

 

Ok just used a great utility by RightMark ... RMClock which looks a fab utility which enables u to underclock the 7200. Seems now that I have probably added 30mins or so to the battery life so I am now looking at 3hrs+ (alot happier). I have not yet properly "stress tested" the laptop looking for that dual core Prime95 util can't remember what it was called now Orthos or something like that!

Any I undervolted the P6 state (x12) to 0.98V down from 1.175 and seems that the 1st P state is locked at 0.95. So won't save alot of power in "idle" conditions but should save plenty under a working load.

Found another handy util called mobile meter for monitoring temps and discharge rate of the battery.

Changing the brightness of the screen made a difference to the discharge rate as expected (-5W) from full to say 60%.

Now idle at around a 20W discharge, about 3 1/2hrs (battery capacity 71Whr)

Guess I will do some more optimisation ... there is so much bloatware on this Acer. Tempting to do a fresh MCE install.

Jules

 

1. The Core series CPUs are locked to a minimum voltage of 0.95V. I reckon this is to create a market segement for lower voltage CPUs.

2. Run Perfmon when on battery and add the %C3 counter to see what proportion of the CPU is in the C3 (low power state). You should get up around 90%. If not, you need to see what is keeping the CPU active. For example, I don't know whether the USB power drain bug in XP ever become a standard part of Windows update. I have found that Bluetooth kept the CPU active and I turfed off the latest McAfee in favour of the previous version for the same reason. Another power drain is Flash (in my opinion animated adverts should be abolished). I have now installed Flashblock for Firefox and this has significantly reduced the power drain.

Maybe all of these, plus a dim backlight, may get your power drain down to around 16W and you can pass 4 hours on the battery.

John

 

Quick question for John and other C2D undervolters: What voltage is your T7200 stable at for its highest PState? Its second highest PState?

I have mine set at 0.987V for the two highest states (when my CPU kicks in 12x and 11x multipliers to achieve 2.0Ghz), and I'm wondering if anybody's gone lower.

 

My T7200 fell over at 1V / 2GHz during original stress testing (but only for an hour or two) and I had it set to 1.025V. However, about a month ago I had it doing some heavy modelling computations which took several hours, so I pushed it up to 1.05V and have had no further problems.

I'm sure I read somewhere on these forums a report by someone saying that they had their T7200 set at 0.95V. I've got the T5600 in my Q35 set at 1V / 1.83GHz - it threw an error at 0.975V but gave no problems at 1V (for an overnight test running two Prime 95s).

John

 

Thanks. I ran two instances of prime95 for an hour and they ran fine. I set the affinity option in the program to distribute them on the two cores evenly, but I'm not sure it did that. Anyhow, no problems at .987V at 2Ghz, so I'm happy with it.