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| Thread ID: 139488 | 2015-05-10 02:02:00 | Improving battery life in Win 7? | forrest44 (754) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 1400413 | 2015-05-10 02:02:00 | I have just picked up a 2nd hand laptop with a fresh copy of windows 7 and am trying to improve the battery life / performance. Eventual plan is to buy new battery and an SSD, but first I am trying to see what I can do with the software side of things. Things I have done so far: Running windows classic theme and turned off all animations/visual effects Disabled unused devices (bluetooth / GSM modem / fingerprint reader) and associated services Removed any unnecessary software, not running an antivirus package Disabled any obviously unnecessary startup processes/services Disabled search indexing From time to time various things will still use a chunk of hard disk or CPU (windows update for example, but I'm sure there are other things). Is there any way to pinpoint which services / processes are using CPU / network / disk resources? Maybe some monitoring/profiling software which will graph this over time per process / service? What services / processes are necessary and what can I do away with? (I am just using the laptop for internet / office type stuff) How much resources does Windows Defender use, should I disable it? (I'm not too concerned with viruses / spyware) Is there any way to tell windows update to get out of the way / pause when the system is running on battery? The CPU is a first gen Core i5 520M - I don't think undervolting is possible with this, but are power states etc optimiseable over their default settings? What else can I do? Cheers |
forrest44 (754) | ||
| 1400414 | 2015-05-10 02:59:00 | You are overlooking the biggest drain and that is the screen. Hard to do much about this unless you turn down the brightness heaps. Look here lifehacker.com |
linw (53) | ||
| 1400415 | 2015-05-10 05:12:00 | I have checked power consumption of the screen by comparing wattage (using vendor's battery info app) with screen on high and low brightness and the change is from ~10 to ~8 watts. Only about 20% improvement. I usually use the screen at about 1/3 brightness anyway. After waking the laptop from sleep just before, according to Resource Monitor a service (inside a svchost.exe host process) was reading 5-40mb / sec for 2 minutes from my disk. I want to be able to find what service is doing this! I have learned how to use Resource Monitor to view CPU usage for individual services inside a single svchost.exe service host process. I can't find how to do this for disk usage - does anyone know how to do this? |
forrest44 (754) | ||
| 1400416 | 2015-05-10 05:49:00 | Use process explorer from sysinternals to see those hidden processes. I think you're wasting your time though. You're only going to slow the computer down or turn off stuff that is actually needed. And it's not going to make a lot of difference anyway. |
CYaBro (73) | ||
| 1400417 | 2015-05-10 09:02:00 | disable indexing, was chewing 5% of my battery. minimum brightness is a must AS IS TURNING THE SCREEN off after 3min. i can get 15 hours out of my netbook if im listening to music and occasionally googling something in an rdp session. | Mirddes (10) | ||
| 1400418 | 2015-05-10 13:12:00 | My advice would be to finally jump on the ssd train. The corsair ssd hard drive I got (www.shoppingexpress.com.au) a few months ago has increased my old HP's battery by 30-40% percent, which isn't much considering I can't go without it for longer than an hour or so, but it just shows how much the regular hard drives tend to drain. | JTunn (17347) | ||
| 1400419 | 2015-05-12 02:06:00 | Get a new battery, or even better, a 3rd party one with higher capacity (if available) | Agent_24 (57) | ||
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