Enhancing battery lifetimes 4693

Madhusudan Singh

Most, if not all, notebook batteries have a charge counter in them. They add one every time a live power cord is inserted. Once that counter reaches a certain number, it deactivates the pack, hence forcing you into parting with some dosh for a very expensive, equally smart battery. Forced obsolescence at work. The average laptop battery lasts 12-18 months.

As an individual who makes a living repairing laptops, I would advise these steps:

1. If you're near a power socket, use it. Use the battery as little as possible, but if you must use it, let it drain. Then give it a complete power-off charge cycle.

2. Go into the BIOS settings and set the power scheme for battery operation to "Battery Optimised". If your BIOS doesn't have this; a: for AMD processors, there's not a great deal you can do except turn down the LCD brightness, switch the HDD timeout, screen timeout and S2D (if your kernel supports this) to short times (1min, 3min and 15min respectively). b: for mobile Pentium 3-4 processors, most BIOSes have what's known as Speedstep; this allows you to choke the processor speed, saving power, allowing the processor to run cooler hence the machine won't kick in the fans as much. Again, set LCD brightness etc to low levels.

3. Again, in the BIOS: disable any external sockets you don't use (ie IRDA, parallel, usb, firewire, PCMCIA); this will not only cut power to these busses, it will also save time during boot and some normal operations while the kernel's configuring these ports.

Even if you're running on mains, setting Speedstep to On and setting HDD timeouts to say, 5min, would save a lot of power and help to reduce the risk of hardware failure through thermal overload.

HTH

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It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion, It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning, it is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.