Portable Low Power Machine

[Searcher7]

The biggest issue for me when it comes to using a laptop is the
battery issue.

I've been trying to figure out the best way to get the most number of
hours out of a re-charge and was looking for advice.

I'm just studying programming, doing some word processing and
occasionally run MAME from a Sandisk Cruzer drive plugged into a USB
port of my desktop PC.

One of the laptops I have is an IBM ThinkPad T22, and I was wondering
if it is possible to use a laptop while keeping the hard drive from
spinning up. (Or is the main power draw the processor?).

Thanks a lot.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.

 

[Grinder]

The biggest issue for me when it comes to using a laptop is the
battery issue.

I've been trying to figure out the best way to get the most number of
hours out of a re-charge and was looking for advice.

I'm just studying programming, doing some word processing and
occasionally run MAME from a Sandisk Cruzer drive plugged into a USB
port of my desktop PC.

One of the laptops I have is an IBM ThinkPad T22, and I was wondering
if it is possible to use a laptop while keeping the hard drive from
spinning up. (Or is the main power draw the processor?).

Thanks a lot.

The hard drive is pretty far down on the list of top consumers. The
number one draw is probably the LCD screen. You can affect that a bit
my adjusting your brightness -- there are probably function keys for that.

Second and third are probably the CPU and GPU. You could probably
underclock the CPU to throttle its consumption, but you'll give up
performance. I'm not sure what can be done about the graphics processor.

They are tiny, and my big monkey hands cannot abide their keyboards, but
netbooks are purported to have impressive charge times.

 

[JR Weiss]

The biggest issue for me when it comes to using a laptop is the
battery issue.

I've been trying to figure out the best way to get the most number of
hours out of a re-charge and was looking for advice.

I'm just studying programming, doing some word processing and
occasionally run MAME from a Sandisk Cruzer drive plugged into a USB
port of my desktop PC.

One of the laptops I have is an IBM ThinkPad T22, and I was wondering
if it is possible to use a laptop while keeping the hard drive from
spinning up. (Or is the main power draw the processor?).

You could replace your HD with a SSD.

Make sure your power-save options are set up, to include slowing down
the CPU. Turn off your WiFi and Bluetooth transmitters.

 

[Guest]

The biggest issue for me when it comes to using a laptop is the
battery issue.

I've been trying to figure out the best way to get the most number of
hours out of a re-charge and was looking for advice.

I'm just studying programming, doing some word processing and
occasionally run MAME from a Sandisk Cruzer drive plugged into a USB
port of my desktop PC.

One of the laptops I have is an IBM ThinkPad T22, and I was wondering
if it is possible to use a laptop while keeping the hard drive from
spinning up. (Or is the main power draw the processor?).

Thanks a lot.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.

There's a program called speedswitch that lets you fine-tune
power save parameters.

http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/

I've used it, but never done any controlled experiments to
determine if it helps battery life.

Remember, that if you slow the processor by a half, you'll save
much less than half the total power...but it'll take twice as long
to do stuff. So, you lose. If it's mostly waiting for you
to hit a key, you may gain.

Turning the HD on and off will increase its failure rate.
Ditto for your display backlight.
Got no data on whether that matters over the useful life of
a laptop. Older Thinkpads had a reputation for backlight failures.
You could tell it was on its last leg when the screen had a red tint
until it warmed up.
Don't know if that applies to yours.

Customers want big, bright displays, lots of horsepower, light weight
and long battery life. Manufacturers make tradeoffs to hit the center
of the market. Don't expect that there's anything you can do to
dramatically increase battery life.

You can get more "useful life" by paying attention. If you spend an hour
daydreaming while you type a 10-minute memo, you're
wasting power. Wake it up, type
for 10 minutes, put it to sleep, daydream for 50 minutes.

Best option might be to get a laptop with two battery slots and hot swap
in the third and forth as needed.

 

[Don Phillipson]

You could replace your HD with a SSD.

An early model Asus Eee may meet the OP's needs. These
came with only solid state memory (about 10 Gb, no hard drive)
and Linux the only OS. For market reasons, HDDs and WinXP
were featured in later models. The demand for long battery life
(say more than 4 or 5 hours) appears to affect the hardware market
(the range we find in the stores) but much less than the supposed
demand for entertainment features nowadays supplied with
laptops offered for business use.