Your email is just about to be sent, your document nearly typed up and, just then, your laptop battery dies. Who doesn’t want to get as much as they can from their battery? Between the addition of cells and the “performance/watt”, battery life is the focus of our efforts to improve lithium-ion performance.

In the quest to attain those life-saving minutes that make the difference between whether or not a project is completed, knowledge is power. In this article, we’ll guide you through some energy saving techniques that work and point out the ones that don’t offer enough to be worthwhile.

This article is the follow up on the previous article on Lithium ion batteries and laptops. For those who missed the beginning, the first article (include link to first article) was focused on the physical aspect of Li-ion batteries (constitution, manipulation, conservation, etc.).

This time around, we will concentrate on the impact of a PC on its battery. To make things clearer we’ve divided it into two sections. Today’s article will concentrate on the measures you can take regarding the operating system. The third, and last, instalment in this energy efficient trilogy will concentrate on the battery consumption of hardware components within a machine.

The following tests aim to reflect an average work environment. The test machine remains the same throughout this article. We are using a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo M3438G-75005. Its specs are as follows:

Processor : Intel Pentium M 750 (90 nm, 2 Mo L2, 1,86 GHz) Chipset : Intel 915PM Front Side Bus : 533 MHz Memory : 2 x 512 Mo DDR2 PC2-3200 HDD : 2 x 80 Go Fujitsu MHT2080 5400 tpm RAID Controller : VIA VT6421 Audio Codec HD : Realtek ALC880 GPU : NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 Gigabit Ethernet controller : Realtek RTL8169/8110 Wi-Fi Controller : Intel PRO/wireless 2200BG Modem : Motorola SM56