Questions about PowerMizer and battery life

I have been very pleased with my dv2000t. Only the battery runtime is disappointing. I noticed that the software for the graphics board includes a "PowerMizer" control (with mouse cursor on the desktop, right click --> NVIDIA Display --> PowerMizer). As shipped from HP, the PowerMizer is set for "Maximum performance" rather than "Maximum power savings" for both "AC Outlet" and "Battery". What little information I could find online about the nVidia PowerMizer was not very helpful. Does anyone have enough practical experience to answer the following questions about setting "Battery" to "Maximum power saving":

1. Does "Maximum power saving" cause any problematic behavior? I would expect the frame rate for video games to be slower. But what about "ordinary" applications such as Firefox, Photoshop, Excel? Are there any problems. What about video streams?

2. Does "Maximum power saving" increase the battery runtime by a significant amount (e.g., greater than 10%)?

3. Other than the issues addressed above, are there any reasons for not setting "Battery" to "Maximum power saving"?

 

1. I have my notebook on Max Power Savings right now and there's zero lag when you're running ordinary applications.

2. No, from my experience, it saves about 20-40 minutes on a 12 cell depending on what you do.

3. Not really unless you want to play games while on battery life but that would be pointless.

 

Thanks. Very helpful answer.

 

http://www.nvidia.com/object/powermizer_sx.html

It looks like it runs a lot of the components in a low power state. I think it clocks down the GPU, lower the brightness on your display, ethernet, usb, and other stuff. I get good battery life out of my laptop.

I also noticed that it is better to adust the display brightness from the Nvidia Settings