Is there anything else I can do to improve my battery time?

I have a X200 and want to squeeze all the battery life I can from it. I played with Power Manager and created a new custom power profile based on the "maximum battery life" profile. The new custom profile has all the same settings as the maximum battery life profile that comes with Power manager but I have set my brightness to only 5 bars. I think anything below 5 bars would be hard to see unless I was in a very dark room.

I started with Power Manager settings, but are there any other things I can do to improve battery life? I have a 160GB 7200rpm drive and don't want to replace it with a SSD drive right now.

Any ideas?

 

did you turn off all other unused devices?
lower the display colour depth?

 

I am not sure what you mean about turing off all unused devices. I don't have bluetooth and the machine does not come with an optical drive. I will also add that I have my Wifi on and am using the Internet 99% of the time when I am using the laptop. It is my main use for the laptop, so shutting the Wifi off is out of the question uless I am just typing a document, in which case I will.

What do you mean by lowering the color depth?

 

16-bit color instead of 32-bit: but that won't really help your battery life, I think.

How many hours are you getting? There's a limit to how much you can realistically squeeze out of a battery.

 

Other then screen brightness your pretty well maxed using a tweaked maximum battery setting. You could use battery stretch, but Im not a big fan of using that. What is your watt usage now?

 

You can tweak vista and remove any unnecessary processes and services.

 

Undervolt CPU w/ RMClcok. Use Powermizer to lower GPU clocks and voltages on battery.

 

Actually this is probably the most significant tweak. haha
Just take your time making sure the system is stable .

 

@MidnightSun - So changing the color depth to 16 bit won't help? I have a 9 cell battery and am getting around 6 hours. I will get a more accurate value in the next few days since I just implemented my maximum power savings power plan.

@liquidxit2 - Thats what I figured, I am pretty maxed out, but I wanted further suggestions. Maybe I am missing something, but battery stretch seems impractical to me. From my understanding of it, it shuts down the Wifi, bluetooth and other things that I need. Like I said I use the Wifi 99% of the time when I use my laptop. I don't know what my watt usage is now, how do I find that?

@jaredy - I am working on that next; to remove unessary processes and services in Vista. The machine doesn't come with too much bloatware. I had a trial for Office 2007, which I uninstalled. Got a few more things to clean up.

@sgogeta4 - Thanks for the suggestion to undervolt. I had heard of that but don't know anything about it. I just saw the thread from flipfire and will take a look at that. But my question is am I not already undervolting? In my power profile that I am running, it lowers the CPU speed to the "lowest" setting.