Maximising laptop battery life

[tortise]

On 9/02/2014 3:59 a.m., David Fletcher 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?
>
> Thanks for any advice.

Hi
For what you describe you can:
Reduce the RAM to 2G (RAM uses power) {Maybe even 1G?}
Use a SSD HDD Saves ~ 50% over a HDD and is Faster as well
Run the screen brightness as low as possible
These measures double the battery charge period in Dell D830 from the 
original configurations.
Its easy to test as usually an estimate of remaining battery life is 
given, make changes and watch that!
Suspend and hibernate as able. Latest BIOS may be relevant.
Without checking consideration of the most efficient CPU may also be 
relevant.  (Latest may be best)
Clean the fan and heatsink.....
That should keep you busy for a bit!
All these measures are more likely to help than using a text editor over 
libreoffice, which would be (I expect) of relatively small assistance.
HTH