Cwazy's homemade battery life guide!

Cwazywazy · January 18, 2015

I was bored so I made a thing.

Do you ever suffer from battery life dysfunction? Well, fear no more! Cwazy's home made guide for maximizing laptop battery life is here to save the day!

Ok, so I've got a Dell Precision M4400. 3GHz Core 2 Duo and a Quadro FX1700m GPU. Not exactly the most energy efficient laptop out there. (GPU has a 50w TDP.) It also has an old used 6 cell I got free. I also have a Dell Latitude E4200 ultrabook. 1.4GHz ULV Core 2 Duo and Intel graphics. Should get pretty good battery life with it's brand new 6 cell.

Stock the M4400 gets around 45 minutes on normal usage. (GPU and CPU running full stock speeds.) Now it gets about 4 hours tops under normal usage. (Browsing the web, watching videos, etc.) I haven't really used the E4200 enough to get a good idea of how long it lasts. (I'm getting somewhere around 5-6 hours.)

How? Well, I'll show you how!

Throttlestop. My favorite program for Intel laptops. I have it installed on every Dell I have.

Guide: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/531329-throttlestop-guide.html

Basically it's a program to manage your CPU speed and voltage. Works with pretty much all Intel laptops. (Anywhere from a low voltage Core 2 Duo in a netbook to a Core i7 in a high end workstation.) I use it to improve performance on AC power by using dual IDA to gain an extra 200MHz of CPU speed and by locking it at the max speed. (So when my M4400 is plugged in it always runs 3.2GHz.) You can also improve temps and battery life without sacrificing performance by undervolting the CPU to the lowest voltage it will run stable at. For my laptop that's about 1.1v at 3.2GHz. I also have it set so that when the laptop is unplugged it will downclock the CPU to 2.2GHz and undervolt to .9v and then after that's set Throttlestop will automatically exit to reduce the amount of system resources being used. Not only will doing this improve battery life, performance on AC, but it will also lower your CPU temperatures which will help if your laptop throttles under gaming load. It also lengthens the life of the CPU. Remember, a cool chip is a happy chip! (My ultrabook has basically the same setup, just with lower voltages and speeds.)

As for the GPU, if your laptop has an Intel GPU or automatically switches to an Intel GPU on battery, you don't really have to worry about this. My laptop's GPU is the most power hungry component of it. A dedicated GPU has what are called pstates. These are different power states that the GPU will switch to when not under load to save the battery. The problem with mine is that most of the time it runs at the max power state (So max speed and voltage) when I'm doing something as simple as watching Netflix which kills battery life. There are probably better ways to do this, but I have my laptop set to automatically lock in the lowest pstate as soon as it boots up since I rarely need more power out of the GPU. (I will reset the pstate back to perfromance mode if I want to play a game.) To do this I have nvidiainspector on my desktop and a couple of batch files. For the lowest speed and voltage pstate the file says something like this: "nvidiainspector.exe -forcepstate:0,10" and when I run it it will force my laptop's GPU to run at the lowest speed and voltage no matter what until I restart the laptop or run another batch file that says "nvidiainspector.exe -forcepstate:0,16" Running it in pstate 10 greatly improves my battery life and the GPU still has enough power at that low speed for light gaming such as FTL or Papers Please. This also makes the laptop run much cooler. (I have the batch file in my startup folder along with Throttlestop.)

More simple/easy stuff to do:

If you don't want to bother with the above stuff here are some easier or smaller things for that extra boost:

Run power saver mode or make your own homemade power plan like me. (Obviously.)
Don't use power hungry programs or games on the battery. (Duh.)
Close unneeded programs and tasks that are using resources.
Turn off WiFi and Bluetooth when not needed.
Turn off secondary hard drives you don't need. (If you have them, I mean.)
Lower screen brightness.
Turn off keyboard backlights.
Replace HDDs with SSDs. (Also makes your system run much faster.)
Buy a new battery if yours is getting old.

There are some other things I used but they're just too much work for a small benefit.