How low can you go?

[spasticteapot]

I've heard that if you turn down the screen brightness, load the full OS into RAM, disable the hard drive, and keep the CPU stepped down to 600mhz, the 1ghz ULV X40 will pull as little as eight watts.

What's the best you've done? Any tips? Any comments in reference to SSDs for improving battery life?

[qviri]

I've heard that if you turn down the screen brightness, load the full OS into RAM, disable the hard drive, and keep the CPU stepped down to 600mhz, the 1ghz ULV X40 will pull as little as eight watts.

That's not terribly impressive - I've seen my X31 go down to 8.50 W* in Vista Ultimate (!) with Aero off, CPU idle and undervolted to 0.780 V (crashes lower), minimum brightness, hard drive spun down, and wireless on but not transmitting. I'm sure the X40 can do better if you undervolt.

* or at least that's what Notebook Hardware Control was telling me

[pgoelz]

FWIW, my X41 pulls 9.6W with the display all the way down, idle, radio on but no activity, bluetooth off, HD spinning but no activity and no other power saving efforts.

Paul

[Terrahawk]

I think this says it all for the amount of power saving that more modern computers achieve:

My X21 averages 8.3 watts when idle, display going at level 5 (of 7), PCMCIA wireless inserted and hard drive still spinning. If I turn the display right down and remove the wireless card, it averages about 6.2 watts. When the display turns off, it uses less than 4 watts.

This is much lower than a power usage floor of 8 watts with undervolting, etc. but at the cost of a significantly poorer performing machine (no more than 384 MB RAM and 700 MHz P3).

On another note, my R40 sits at about 8.9 watts when idle, display at 5/7, CPU undervolted to 0.796V and with wireless on but not active, HDD spinning and DVD drive inserted.