Maximising laptop battery life

[wcj9996 at frontier.com]

On 02/08/2014 01:39 PM, tortise wrote:
> 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.
> HT 

I would suggest shutting off the WIFI also.

   walt

-- 
-----  walt  wcj9996 at frontier.com -----