Would any of these options extend my battery life?

I think it really depends on how you use it. For the RAM, if you have high RAM usage, then removing some would just make you use swap more, and the HDD spinning more will probably decrease your battery faster than the RAM would. SSDs are more energy efficient than HDDs, so unless you hardly use your RAM, don't remove it is my opinion. DDR3 uses 1.5 V, DDR2 uses 1.8 V. I'm not familiar with voltage, so I don't know if this is per hour or second or what.

CPU.. I think that throttling it should help, but I've heard some interesting arguments about HDDs that I think might apply here. Lots of people say 7200rpm for laptops is stupid, because it would drop battery life. But I've also heard that 7200rpm isn't bad, because the faster access speed allows you to go back to idle quicker than 5400rpm would, thus... not dropping battery life. Or at least not as much as people think?

I'm not completely sure about all this. My suggestion would be to find out how (if possible) to throttle it and then experiment with whatever works better.

Last edited by gareim (2010-08-06 02:38:00)

I have 4GB DDR3 Ram. Like i said, i never use more than 1GB ram, and so taking a stick out, putting me at 2GB wouldn't make me use swap any more than I am now (which is 0 ).
My HDD is 5400RPM, but the hope is i wouldnt be waking it very often. Most of the time i just need it to last through a lecture, which is just taking notes in gedit or keepnote. I hope that it wouldn't even touch the harddrive until i told it to save.

Cool, i forgot about swapiness. Will probably do that, and check out the options jmbarnes provided.
I'm thinking I might have a second session setup that i can go into just for taking lectures notes, which really will have nothing going on (might even try to find something lighter than openbox as a wm )

Hehe, yeah, I don't really believe that either, but I guess what people (over at Slickdeals) mean is that there's more to it than just numbers. If I had to guess, I would say the 7200rpm uses more power, but not as much as you might think because of the lower access time.. But overall more energy used anyways.

@FSM Have you heard of Minitube? I recently found out about it from another help thread, and it is awesome! Has some design flaws, but I think it has less CPU usage than YouTube in a browser.

By the way, does your name have anything to do with the Flying Spaghetti Monster?? I kept meaning to ask you that!

could a netbook be an option? as soon as i got a netbook, my "laptop" became a "desktop".  its plugged in at the desk 90% of the time now.  i get about 5 hours of battery on my EEE. and with suspend to ram on the lid close, it lasts all day.

Hi FSM, have you tried to install cpufrequtils? It will let you to set your cpu frequency or frequency governors like powersave, ondemand, or performance.

Other things you can try is to lower screen backlighting, turn off wifi and bluetooth, since you have enough RAM turn off Swap, buy more efficient HDD or SSD (I running on SSD, but I don't see much difference in battery life). Or just buy spare battery, probably the cheapest solution.

I recently read about putting some folders in RAM, such as /tmp. I am sure there were more you can put in ram without any danger. You simply have to add the lines to your fstab:

tmpfs           /tmp            tmpfs   defaults        0       0

For that, it might be better if you let the ram-stick in the laptop, you will weigh out the used power with less harddrive accesses.