Laptop power saving tip

[Dos_Box]

This is probably one of those 'You mean you didn't know! We all did' type moments, but here is something that has seen me eak an extra 30+ mins battery life from my Lenovo Thinkpad. It uses an Intel 5100 AGN WiFi card, and simply ramping the transmit power down to 'medium' has made all the differance. If anyone else has seen this kind of battery life extension please let me know, and if you have not yet done it, please do and let me know how you get on here. The battery life gain may also vary from card to card as well I suspect but it would be nice to see some confimation here. This would also be a good tip for schools with lots of laptops and managed wireless as well.
Now to try it on the medium-low setting for a day or so

[Dos_Box]

Just to let you all know, I ran my Thinkpad with the wireless on the medium-low setting last night and it made a huge differance. I almost got 4 hours out of it in 'normal' use (it does have an extended battery), but I only usually get 2 and a bit hours out of it. If anyone else can use a differant make/model and post up the results on battery life extension then please let us know.

[Ric_]

Did you know that turning the wireless off completely helps even more?

[Dos_Box]

I tried that, but the lack of a full Windows experience put me off.

[mac_shinobi]

Use linux instead of windows as the memory management and file storage systems work better. Not sure how you would tweak the wifi setting on linux though.

Short of that plug it into the mains socket or shut it down

New Mac Book Pro's have a battery that states it lasts up to 10 hours, I bet thats only about 7 or 8 at most obviously depending on what you are doing

What about turning bluetooth off ??

Screen uses the most power I would of thought so lowering the brightness of the screen also the Lenovos power manager should if you have configured it disable the optical drive when its not used or needed ??

[SYNACK]

@mac_shinobi - the power managment on linux is aweful, you'd loose at least half an hour of life on most laptops as they are siply not optimised properly.

@Dos_Box - I'm thinking that junky Intel drivers may also play a part in that, surely the driver should modulate transmit power automagicly.