Znote 6224W and battery life

Hi all,

I am the proud owner of a new znote 6224w (i have had it a week now) and having spent some time getting used to vista, i was wondering if there are any tweaks for getting a bit more battery life out of the laptop. At the moment, i am getting just 30 minutes if i play Company of Heroes and only around 60 minutes if i am just word processing.

I know this is a performance laptop, and the best i can expect due to the graphics card is around 2 hours when idling, but i would like more than what i am getting at the moment!

I have the 1.6ghz processor, 2gb of pc5400 ram and the intel wifi, otherwise everything else is standard (120gb 7200 hdd, 8600GT, etc). I am currently running Vista and have noticed that the fans seem to be almost constantly on high, even when just sat at the desktop, and the processor speed is a constant 1.6ghz even when on battery and powersaver mode (default vista setting).

Am i missing something simple here? is it a BIOS setting i havent found, or is there a program i can use to get more information about the speed stepping, voltages, fan speeds, etc.

I am quite an experienced computer user, i just havent had intel before, especially not a core2duo and a laptop, so i could do with some guidance!

(I am currently wishing that i had gone for the 12cell battery!)

Thanks in advance for your help.

Hugh

 

Search the web for Vista Battery Saver

 

Here it is

Link

But AFAIK it only disables aero, nothing else And that won't give you extra battery time

 

It does save 10 to 15 minutes of battery power on my 6625WD. Other things that you can do is undervolting the CPU, downloading latest nVidia drivers so you can use the Powermizer (which underclocks your GPU to save power) But I do find it weird that you can't use the Vista power saving options. Normally I have about 1:50 hours of battery life time. With the powermizer, lowest brightness, cpu clocking to 1.2ghz (instead of 2.0), standard windows look (no aero), I can get a maximum of 2:20 or 2:30 out of my battery.

 

Undervolting wont give him more battery life, if he's already using "power saving" option (which I think he is, he's getting 2hrs). It will set the lowest FID/VID, and you can't lower that! The lowest is 0.850V

Other things you could do:
Kill unnecessary services... search for services.msc
Disable Indexing, it will stop the hard drive from thrashing, and save some battery!

 

Do you use the 'energy levels' ...?

With energylevel at 'energy saving' I can internet/ using office for 2 hours..
With energylevel at 'high prestations' I can play a game for 1 hour ;-)

 

Also read this thread.

John