Laptop Battery Saving Tips

Laptop Battery Conservation Tips
By Matt@Smalldog.com

Small Dog’s home base in Waitsfield experienced an unexpected power
outage this morning. I wrote this on a MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33GHZ
15” machine, which a half hour ago had a full charge but only
estimated 1 hour 45 minutes of remaining battery life.

I know from experience with my 1.67GHZ PowerBook G4 that the pro
machines lag behind the consumer models in battery life, and since I
am in the position of having to conserve battery life I thought I’d
share my technique.

- Lower the display brightness all the way down. Doing this will
generally double the estimated remaining battery life if beforehand
you were set to full brightness.

- Disable keyboard backlighting.

- Ensure that Energy Saver is set to spin down hard disks when possible.

- Put your computer to sleep whenever you’re not actively using it,
like when you’re on the phone, in the bathroom, or walking the dog.

- Eject optical disks. They spin, taking power, even when they’re not
actively being used.

- Have lots of RAM installed. This helps prevent excessive virtual
memory use (virtual memory is hard drive space that’s turned into
“virtual” RAM. When the computer needs more RAM than is physically
installed, it’ll dip into virtual memory reserves, and cause
increased disk activity. For this reason, avoid invoking dashboard
for its excessive memory use; consider using activity monitor to kill
the dock process, which owns Dashboard. If you’ve invoked Dashboard,
killing the Dock will free up all the memory it used. Consider
disabling Spotlight as well (see http://aplawrence.com/foo-mac/remove-
spotlight.html) because its indexing is both processor- and disk-
intensive.

- Use your iPod for music. iTunes keeps the hard drive working.

- Type in TextEdit, not Word. Word’s autosave feature spins up the
hard drive all the time; TextEdit does no such thing.

- Don’t keep unused Applications running in the background.

- If you use Quicksilver (you should by the way—http://
quicksilver.blacktree.com), ensure that it does not re-catalogue,
which is hard drive- and processor-intensive. Set it to rescan every
24 hours.

- We’re still in the dark here, but the generator is chugging away
keeping the web servers and VOIP phone system up and running. With
these techniques I increased estimated battery life from 1h45m to
3h20m…that’s a big difference!