I forgot about this post on the Windows Engineering blog that we put up back in January 2009. It’s a very interesting article on how to properly tune your Windows configuration to extend the life of your laptop’s battery. What makes it interesting is this chart in particular which explains what uses the most power on your notebook:
MORAL: TURN DOWN YOUR DISPLAY’S BRIGHTNESS & SET DISPLAY TIMEOUT TO 2 MINUTES
Got it? Hopefully that makes things pretty clear up front. The component that is the single biggest consumer of power on your laptop is the LCD display and reducing it’s brightness can SUBSTANTIALLY enhance battery life – far more so than any other component on your machine. Even better still, enable your display’s timeout function to something aggressively short – like 2 minutes. This will kill power altogether to the display saving you even more battery power when you’re not using the laptop.
In comparison, functions like Intel’s “SpeedStep” that adjusts processor power via the hardware doesn’t affect your battery life that dramatically in comparison to the power used by your LCD panel. In fact, if you’re running Windows 7, the operating system itself will dynamically set the utilization of the CPU depending on how much processing you need so you can minimize power consumption even more flexibly in comparison.
(Now what’s missing of course is the DVD ROM drive. That’ sucker CHEWS power but it’s assumed that most people don’t use it all that much. That it of course unless you watch DVDs on your laptop in which case, you’re in for some dramatically shorter battery life.)
For more on this topic, visit the Windows Engineering blog post that this references:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/06/windows-7-energy-efficiency.aspx
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 