boost battery life w/ X61

i originally put this in the gaming section but i thought id mention it here too for the X61 owners; i recently noticed that most games, new or old use 100% of cpu power while running, no matter what their doing, even when minimized, which will drain your battery like crazy, however older games do not require so much cpu power, and i found a program called SPEEDSWITCHXP which locks the cpu into lower speed instead of SpeedStep which is a dynamic switching algorithm, this will keep the cpu locked into low-speed (800mhz for me) no matter how busy the cpu is, which means you can run an older game like fallout or deus ex with same performance but with much longer battery life; this also keeps your laptop from heating up which is an issue when playing games on the X61; now i can game on it and it runs cool since the CPU never has to push more than 800mhz, the program is very easy to use you just right-click on its icon in taskbar and choose "battery optimized" to lock the cpu, it can also show an icon in taskbar with your current cpu utilization (turn it on in options); http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/ thats the link to DL it, to switch to dynamic or full performance modes all you have to do is right click on the icon in taskbar and choose it

hope this helped someone, i know it helped me o_0
cheers

 

will less cpu power cause the game to not play as smooth as it would with 100% cpu power? Have you tested it out?

 

well logically this depends on the game of course, counter strike is alot more cpu dependent than most games, morrowind is a cpu hog, most older games, unreal engine and back will run perfect at 800mhz, you just look at the recommended specs for the game if their lower than 800mhz then your fine; i tested it out with deus ex, system shock 2, fallout2, half life, all of them obviously run fantastic at that speed, deus ex is more cpu dependent than most but there are no serious slowdowns