Power Management - The Need to Conserve

There are a number of factors that influence the ‘battery life’ of your laptop. Some are due to the technology built inside the laptop and some are based on the usage pattern of the users. Suffice to say most people have their own individual settings.

Technologies that influence battery life: Well the most obvious one is the processor. There are many different class of processors and they fall into four categories - high performance, mainstream, low voltage and ultra low voltage. To give you a brief overview on this take high performance, an example is the Intel Quad Core Q Series. The onboard technologies designed to make the processor faster also requires more power to run the technology. The performance gain also has a heat generating effect which requires more cooling to keep the system more efficient. The net effect is a laptop that invariably has a faster battery drain since it is working harder to maintain optimal conditions. The more you move towards a lower voltage CPU (Central Processing Usage) the easier on the battery it becomes. Manufacturers such as Intel and AMD also apply more intelligence into the CPU so that it is able to run at a lower clock speeds when it senses the laptops is idle or when it is used on battery mode.

The LCD display is another piece of technology that influences battery life. Also known as the TFT display the majority of them use a backlight that is powered by a CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp). The lamp generates the light to provide the brightness to the display. There are laptops in the market such as the Toshiba Qosmio G50 that uses two CCFL to provide even brighter images. The battery drain from the LCD can be quite fast if brightness levels are kept high. The latest technology available for LCD displays uses LED backlight – these are much more power efficient and more robust than CCFL. They are currently more expensive to produce and are available on displays up to 14” on a laptop such as the Tecra R10 series.

The way the settings are managed on your laptop heavily influences the battery life you are able to achieve before having to recharge. Most laptops have a default setting which includes dimming the display, turning off the display if not used after 10 minutes as well as turning off the hard drive. This can be improved again by taking the following steps:

1. Switching off all your wireless connectivity if you don’t need them – WiFi and Bluetooth.
2. Dimming your backlight further than the default.
3. With some processors you can change the speed setting so that it runs at a lower clock speed.
4. Setting your display to turn off the backlight more quickly
5. Turn off applications that run on the background – A good example is the Aero™ function with Windows Vista.

By following a few steps you should be able to get more battery life out of your laptop and therefore benefit more from it. Ideally you should think about the type of usage you need before buying the laptop. On average a laptop is good for up to 2.5 to 3 hours of usage. If you choose a lower voltage processor you can expect over 5 hours. Also consider laptops that can take a high capacity or additional batteries when making deciding which to go for.