Maximising laptop battery life

[tortise]

On 9/02/2014 11:39 a.m., wcj9996 at frontier.com wrote:
> 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

Yes thanks for that reminder Walt, the WiFi card could be removed as 
could also any modem card!