Maximising laptop battery life

[David Fletcher]

On Sat, 2014-02-08 at 15:05 +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 8 February 2014 14:59, David Fletcher <dave at thefletchers.net> wrote:
> > I have a friend, whose old laptop I've refurbished by maxing the RAM,
> > replacing the failed battery, purging it of XP and putting in Linux on a
> > new hard drive.
> >
> > Now, she's got some work assignments coming up to sit with disabled
> > students in lecture theatres and use the laptop to type up lecture notes
> > for them.
> >
> > My question is, will the battery last any longer using a simple text
> > editing application such as gedit, rather than Libre Office?
> >
> > My reasoning is that Libre Office is huge overkill for the simple task
> > of bashing words into the computer, and does loads more work such as
> > figuring out proportional character spacing with every key stroke, which
> > must takes loads more processor cycles to accomplish, and is completely
> > unnecessary for the task.
> >
> > Is she likely to get longer battery life with a text editor rather than
> > a word processor?
> 
> You've not specified specification, pre- or post-upgrade, so it is a
> little hard to say.
> 
> Does it have enough RAM to run Ubuntu, LibreOffice & any background
> apps without swapping to disk? If so, no, there will probably not be
> any measurable difference. Swapping hits battery much more heavily
> than most other things.

It's an Acer Extensa 5510, now upgraded to 4GB RAM. There's enough under
the hood to run MS Office, under MS XP, under VirtualBox, "just in case"
she needs it!

BTW I was fiddling around the other day to get a fresh, clean, updated
XP VM before they cut out the support in April. I found that if you've
got an installer with SP2 on the CD, the updater won't work any more. I
also found that you can manually download Service Pack 3, install that,
then the update works.

Dave

> 
> 
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