Regaining battery life lost to Vista

[marlinspike]

If I don't care about the various vista niceities (in fact, the first things I did were to turn off Superfetch and indexing), what can I do to regain the battery life I had with XP? T60 is in question. I didn't mind the loss of battery life at first because I was still getting 5hrs, but now that my batteries have a couple hundred cycles on them (so they have lost capactiy), I'd really like that hour back.

[K0LO]

According to this post, Vista can be made more power efficient than XP. See the last post on the first page of the thread. Since pibach hangs out here on the Thinkpads forum, perhaps he can help with the details (and translation from German).

[marlinspike]

Sweet, I speak enough German to figure it out, just slowly!

[SHoTTa35]

your system is with a 9 cell getting 5hrs? With Vista on my 6 cell i got 3hrs 24mins (93%-5%) so i figured it's great just the same. This was browsing the net and all that, not just sitting idle. Sitting idle my estimated time was 5hrs 51mins at like 80% left...

So what are you getting now and what's your usage like? I have all default Vista services running and stuff like superfetch would actually SAVE power since the programs are already in memory and therefore the HD can spin down for longer times.

[marlinspike]

No, I'm getting like 4hrs nowadays that my batteries are older (though I just realized my vid card was set to max performance when on battery, DOI!), but keep in mind I have the 15" flexview screen (though yes I do have the 9 cell). That's the amount of time I get using it for work type stuff (internet, e-mail, word processing)

I have most of the default Vista stuff running, but stuff like Superfetch just ticks me off because I use different programs all the time and they are large programs, so Superfetch just doesn't work for me other than to slow down boot times. I also do ram intensive stuff, so I don't need ram wasted with programs I might not use.

With XP I got 6hrs, and as soon as I went to Vista that dropped to 5.

BTW, I grew up in Bethesda.

[Trekk69]

I'm in class, X61T w/ Vista 32, look down see 92% Battery life and 8.14hrs remaining.
Next day in class, look down and see 54% batter life remaining, and see 4.04hrs remaining.

I have everything off, screen to the lowest, maximum battery profile selected and take out the battery whenever its plugged in. I got it in November and have had great life. I have the 8cell.

[marlinspike]

Well, an X61 is a whole different ball game. Not only is it's a much lower energy use computer, but also computers that came with Vista tend not to have the battery life problems that computers that were "upgraded" to Vista have.

[ghosh9691]

If I don't care about the various vista niceities (in fact, the first things I did were to turn off Superfetch and indexing), what can I do to regain the battery life I had with XP? T60 is in question. I didn't mind the loss of battery life at first because I was still getting 5hrs, but now that my batteries have a couple hundred cycles on them (so they have lost capactiy), I'd really like that hour back.

Turning off the indexing is fine, but I would not turn off Superfetch since it actually helps in performance by learning which programs you run most often and the time of the day you run them and then pre-loading them into RAM to avoid spinning up the disk

[warder]

SP1 is supposed to improve power on laptops...

• Improves power consumption when the display is not changing by allowing the processor to remain in its sleep state which consumes less energy.
• Addresses the problem of the Video chipset (VSync interrupt) not allowing the system to stay asleep.
• Improves power consumption and battery life by addressing an issue that causes a hard disk to continue spinning when it should spin down, in certain circumstances.

[SafeHarbor]

Downloading it now...