Dynamic Processing & Windows Vista

Hey guys,

A person wrote in and suggested that the dynamic processing feature (which allows the computer's processor to scale up or down depending on the needs of the processor when running on battery power to save battery life) found in my dv2000t (running windows xp) was there because of my Nvidia graphics card (and the corresponding Nvidia graphics drivers). I'm curious, I can't find dynamic processing anywhere in my dv6000t (running Vista), but if it's because of the poor graphics driver support at the moment, I would understand why it's not there. Is this true? In other words, what "thing" in a computer gives the computer the ability to use dynamic processing? I think this is a pretty important feature, which is why I would appreciate anybody's input. Thanks so much.

John

 

Dynamic Processing or Speedstep(Intel)/Powernow(AMD) is independant of the graphics card. It is controlled by the processor itself or through the processor drivers. Vista should have the necessary drivers to enable dynamic processing by default. No other action is typically necessry and most OEM's will make sure that the BIOS and other components do support this feature as well. This has nothing to do with the Nvidia GPU drivers.

Do note that Nvidia GPU's have their own dynamic power control technology dubbed Powermizer which basically controls the clocks on the graphics card and is dependant on the GPU drivers. I havent tried Vista for a while, so I dont know the current state of affairs with the drivers but if you look though the Control Panel settings for the graphics card you should see separate settings to control this.

 

Ya, Nvidia does have these options, too bad the Vista Control Panel for Nvidia cards blows a$$

 

but by default, will it (nvidia card in vista) go into power save?

 

It should, generally the default settings will be full performance on A/C and max power saving on battery power. You can change this around depending on your usage.

 

Grr okay, I was hoping I had an excessively wasteful hardware configuration or drivers were causing my crummy battery life.
1% battery every two minutes isn't cool

 

So does anyone know how to enable dynamic processing in Vista then?

John

 

Set your power setting to "laptop/portable"

 

Maybe your battery is damaged

 

Can anybody verify this?

John

 

Yes, it true although the Portable/laptop settings is for XP. In Vista using the "Balanced" power scheme will achieve the same objective. You can download/run a utility like CPU-Z which will show the clock speed of your cpu change based on the requirements. If you have a Core/Core2 then the cpu should idle at 1GHz and increase whenever a program requires it.

 

Here you go -

Click start, type 'pow', Hit <enter> to open power options.

In whatever power plan is selected you can "change plan settings" and make the CPU Min and Max whatever you want. There's a lot of other cool stuff in there too. Like PCI express power mode, etc. I made two of my own plans (look on the left side of the window for "create power plan") one for everyday and one for gaming.