getting better battery life.

If you run in safe mode, doesn't it disable the gpu drivers, and then you could get better battery life correct. Of course you couldn't run too many things in safe mode, but you could run word and probably a browser.

 

Because it's still using the discrete card w/o any hardware control it could actually hurt battery life, as the card won't downclock when not in use. Furthermore I'm not sure if frequency scaling on the CPU work either in safe mode.

 

Darn, I really thought I was on to something. Is it possible to downclock the gpu further.

 

Downclock your discrete card using Nvidia profiles, turn down screen brightness to lowest level, turn off wireless radios, disable unneeded services (indexing for sure) and switch to a single SSD (no DVD or 2nd drive).

I got an extra 10min on my Asus (~80min instead of 70min)... still cant watch a movie on a battery tho.

 

@aduy (or any P150HM owner)....can you get through a movie while on battery?

 

yeah i watched 3 50minute episodes of 24 on max brightness and performance power setting and still had 15% left.

 

DVD drive doesn't consume any power when nothing is in it. SSD depends on the drive, some actually consume more than traditional HDD's, but usually less. Although for the consumption of these beasts it won't make a whole lot of difference, maybe contributes 80% to your extra 10 minutes you got.

@aduy - great news about the time you can use it on battery! I'm gonna work on ways to eek out every minute of battery life just for fun. But useable 3 hours is reasonable to be honest.

 

Edited ,

sorry misunderstood please ignore this

 

hmm what if you ran in 800x600 resolution without scaling as in native turned off scroll lock, and all of the usual, and limited the cpu to 10% maximum usage. i think ill try this. also why doesn't it give an estimate of the battery life?

 

The windows battery bar will take a few cycles to be accurate. There are better (free) third party applications out there for pretty accurate battery life estimation (not sure if I can link to them as a reseller, but others here use them and have brought them up before)

 

will it show up after a few times or will it just say the percentage?

 

BatteryCare and BatteryBar are options. Not sure if one is better than another, as they both offer similar features, but both are surely worth a look. I like BatteryBar because the big icon on the tray tells you what battery % or time left. BatteryCare requires you to pin it to the system tray and hover over it.

But BatteryCare is free for all features, BatteryBar requires you to pay to get all features, however, the author usually has a sale to name your own price from $1 to $20. Worth paying $1 at least in any case. And the free version works for most people.

 

lol you cant use the laptop in safe mode, without using the power supply, it doesn't even recognize the battery. whats the lowest wattage that your system was pulling out, mine will dip below 20watts but mostly its around 24 on the lowest settings. also what overclocking program can you use to underclock the lower settings? i think before i used ati tool to do it on my dell.

 

lol or Sager/Clevo could implement switchable graphics and then people wouldn't have to waste time downclocking their dGPU...