Conserving Your Laptop's Power

You can do certain things to help your laptop's battery last a bit longer. On the short list, you have computer components that consume a lot of power:

• The hard drive

• The CD/DVD drive

• The floppy drive (if you have one)

• The modem

• The network interface

• The display

Each of the above devices consumes power when you use it. Obviously, by not using those devices or by rationing their use, you can save a modicum of power.

For example, by setting a lower resolution and fewer colors on the display, you cause the computer to use less video resources (though this technique saves only a minor amount of power). For more savings, consider not using the CD/DVD drive, which requires real power to keep it spinning (such as when you're watching a DVD movie).

But you can really take control by setting various timeouts in the Power Options Properties dialog box, Power Schemes tab, as you can see in Figure 1. Here, you can disable or timeout certain laptop features and help extend battery life in a dramatic way.

Figure 1 shows two major items: Turn Off Monitor and Turn Off Hard Disks. You can direct Windows to turn off those power-sucking hardware leeches after a given period of inactivity, greatly saving battery life.

In Figure 1, the settings disable both the monitor and hard drive after five minutes of inactivity. This disability works just like Stand By, or sleep, mode: Power to those devices quietly turns off. The hard drive stops spinning. The monitor goes blank. The devices wake up if you need them to, so if you want access to your hard drive, the computer restores power to the hard drive. And if you press a key or touch the mouse pad, the display comes back to life, as well.

You can also use the Power Schemes tab of the Power Options Properties dialog box to set when your laptop automatically suspends or hibernates when it's running under battery power.

When you find device custom settings that work for you, save them permanently. Click the Save As button and type something like "My Scheme." That way Windows remembers your settings, and you can choose "My Scheme" from the list, should Windows forget.

Here are some tips for making the most of your battery power:

• You have separate settings for when the laptop is plugged in and when it's running off battery power.

• Yes, you can't see the screen saver if you suspend the monitor before the screen saver kicks in.

• You may want to snooze the hard drive, especially if you don't plan on doing much hard drive access while using your laptop.

• Any disk access at all does wake up the hard drive, which requires an extra squirt of energy. If you set the hard drive to sleep after one minute, but you constantly revive it, then you're actually wasting power. Try another setting.

• You can tell when the hard drive has been sleeping because it takes a wee bit longer for disk access to complete stuff like file saving, opening programs, browsing folders, and so on.

• When a computer is plugged in, you don't need to suspend hard drive operation.

• You can also save power by running the laptop's microprocessor at a slower rate. This option is automatically controlled in modern laptops, though older laptops may have some manual control over the CPU or bus speeds.

Grabbed from
Yahoo! Tech