[Advanced Guide]Maximum Battery Management

1. First, upgrade BIOS to 3305 or above

2. Patch your ACPI EC driver by this thread: viewtopic.php?f=44&t=1888&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=300#p37252
Patching the drive stops error and allow your harddrive to idle.

3. Get the A1ctl software. when you have to use battery, turn off your fan at temperature below 55C, {I been told that it's better to leave CPU at a higher frequency so it can idle more}

turning off your fan shaves off 0.6W

4.go to control panel, and click on power options

5. choose max battery, and allow hard drive to spin down after 3 mins

when your hard drive idles, it shaves off about 1W

6. choose action when close the lip to "standby"

7. Go to system in control panel, add a hardware profile, name it maximum battery

8. restart with the said profile, go to hardware in control panel, turn off the follow hardware
- all USB hubs, assuming you are using this max battery mode to read
- LAN/Wifi
- BT or 3G if you have them
- camera
- flash slots if you don't use them

9. go search for eboostr, it's a software that allow usage of readyboost on windows, and conserve battery by using flash drive instead of hard drive when on battery. I have 6G of flash memory total installed on my 120Gb AA1.

10. Last but not least, turn down screen brightness.

Extreme: if you are using a Hitachi hard drive, go download their ftool on their website, copy all dos file on to the root directory of a bootable USB stick created by unetbootin, and run the ftool.exe under freedos.

you can then put the hard drive power saving to more aggressive in expensive of the life of the hard drive. I won't be using the hard drive for more than 3 years so I put aggressive. this shaves off another 0.3W

When using all those steps above, your machine will be silent and cool. I project the power consumption in Windows XP might be around 7.4-7.8W after all those tweaks. with a more conservative value of 7.8W, you can get past 3 hours with a 3 cell 2200mah and get around 3 hour 30 mins with a 2400mah 3 cell. with a 9 cell 6600mah, it's therotically possible to get a whopping 9 hour and 20 minutes if all you are doing is reading novels on a red eye flight.

I am still waiting for my 9 cell, so I can't report anything yet.

 

If you guys tried this method, let me know your power consumption with minimal use (say during word)

try the notebook battery info

http://www.batteryinfo.de.vu/

 

I don't think stepping down the clock at 800Mhz helps, the Atom and other power efficient CPUs handle idle time really well and goes into C3/C4 sleeping state so the default dynamic/on-demand clocking should yeilds longer runtime

It's also called, "rush to idle", meaning the faster you can acheive an task, the more time the CPU will idle thus saving energy
There should be very little power consumption difference between 800 and 1600mhz anyway

Edit, here:
See the CPU part
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_re ... onsumption
and http://www.bughost.org/pipermail/power/ ... 00166.html:

it saves power for not-idle; when you're idle it won't save you much
power.

it's better power wise as well; it's a bit complex to explain, but
it's better to execute the code you need to execute at full speed, and
then really quickly go idle, than it is to execute at a much lower speed.

Maybe a simple example (I plucked these numbers out of the air, they
don't represent any real cpu that exists) will help:
Say you have a cpu that consumes 40 Watts at full speed, and 30 Watts
at half speed, and 4 Watts when idle.
You have something to do, lets say mp3 decoding of 1 second of audio,
and that takes a full second at half speed, and one second at full speed.

At full speed decode + idle, that is half a second at 40 watts (20
Joules) and half a second at 4 Watts (2 Joules); total is 22 Joules.
At half speed decode, that is a full second at 30 Watts, so 30 Joules.

So, what ondemand does would cost 22 Joules, while a "hit the exact
frequency" governer would cost you 30 Joules.....[/quote:39pr7z8u]

 

can someone with a batttery benchmark this? 800mhz vs. 1600mhz, usage scenario, mostly word broswing and idle?

 

I tried the exact steps; however my netbook is still consuming ~9-9.5 W. I must be missing something; please suggest.

 

did you set your hard drive to spin down after 3 mins? If you did, and I have ran into the exact same problem as you do, you should turn off AVG or any antivirus program, turn off Wifi (of course) and any unused devices. turn off fan (fan uses about 0.6W)

if you have programs run on the background, hard drive won't be able to spin down. you should be consistently hitting 8W with my guide.

 

something that works under linux at least: turn down the volume, that shaves off ~0.3W (when nothing is playing).