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    Making the most out of the laptop's battery

    Discussion in 'HP' started by wajed, Aug 18, 2011.

  1. wajed

    wajed Notebook Enthusiast

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    I think the uptime of my laptop with light usage is 3 hours. Now it says 2:30 mins 80%. That is with gpu switched to the integrated instead of the discrete.

    I have core 2 quad 2.0Ghz 4 cores 8 threads 6mb L3 cache, with HD 3000 GPU.
    And ATI HD 6770M.

    How do I make the most out of my battery?

    1) I'm thinking of disabling 4-6 threads (2-3 cores) when I'm not gaming. Is that possible?
    2) I'll follow the undervolting guide.
    3) I'm thinking of applying thermal paste, but I'm hesitant as I don't want to open my laptop.
    How much can all of these do me in terms of battery life?

    4) What about moving from HDD to SSD? How much can I gain?

    What other things can I do?

    Also, an important question, should I keep my laptop plugged in when battery is full? Or is it best to do the otherwise?
    I use the laptop as a desktop, so I need it to be always on.

    One more question: when switching to integrated gpu, does the discrete one get fully disabled?
     
    wajed, Aug 18, 2011
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  2. HTWingNut

    HTWingNut Potato

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    I didn't think you could undervolt an Intel CPU unless it was an XM quad core?

    Disabling 4-6 threads, I tried it on a Sager laptop I had, but had little to no bearing on the battery life, primarily because on battery the CPU is already running super slow, and anything you do on battery usually isn't very CPU intensive.

    Thermal paste will really only help with temps. The fan should spin less, but that's a minor power consumption unless it's off completely, and Coolsense on quietest mode will barely ever run the fan.
     
    HTWingNut, Aug 20, 2011
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  3. wajed

    wajed Notebook Enthusiast

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    I didn't look at the guide yet, and sorry, it's quad cores and it's Core i7 Sandy Bridge, not Core 2 Quad.

    I also tried disabling 4 threads (2 cores) but it didn't work either. Probably because it's just that windows ignores the cores, not because the cores really shut down. If there is a way to shut down the extra cores, I think results will be better. I hope I could try at least disabling hyper-threading, as I believe it will help; but I can't since BIOS doesn't support it.
     
    wajed, Aug 21, 2011
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  4. HTWingNut

    HTWingNut Potato

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    Even the Core i7 quads idle at or near that of a dual core i5.
     
    HTWingNut, Aug 21, 2011
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