Avoid tethering yourself to a power outlet when you're on-the-go with your laptop with weblog Friedbeef's 15 tips for extending your laptop's battery life. Some of the tips are obvious (like dimming your screen) while others are more unusual, like:
1. Defrag regularly - The faster your hard drive does its work - less demand you are going to put on the hard drive and your battery. Make your hard drive as efficient as possible by defragging it regularly.I can't imagine the defrag tip making that much of a difference in battery life, but since you already set up an automated defrag (Related) , this should be an easy tip to follow. Most of the other tips involve smart power economy, like quitting running programs and disabling hardware you aren't using. If you do much work unplugged, following a few of these tips could help improve your battery life significantly.
I imagine the impact of defragging is extremely minimal unless your hard drive is extremely fragmented. Most tips are good though, such as not having many applications running in the background and dimming the screen. Although on many newer notebooks, the screen will automatically dim when not connected to the power supply.
Most modern OSes make "defrag"ging unnecessary.
Not even a mention of turning off all the radios you aren't using? Shut off wi-fi and bluetooth if you aren't using them.
I think that lowering your graphics resolution is a bit absurd. You will slow down your work by having to scroll around a lot more, requiring more battery time. I also doubt that screen resolution has a measurable impact on power consumption.
Wow, good article. I read through it and alot of it was pretty much common sense in someways. Anyway, did not know that if you did not keep your hard drive defragged, it clutters things up and consumes more power. Thanks Lifehacker for the great find :D
I liked #14:
Get yourself a more efficient laptop.
I would think buying a backup battery for your existing existing would be cheaper than buying a new laptop, but whatever...
@eeefresh: Buying a backup battery is a great idea except that if you plan on keeping it around it's best to store it at 40% charge as cold as possible (in a bag in the freezer if u can). Lithium Ion batteries lose about 20% of their charge a year when kept at 100% charge at 20C. If you're really that desperate on getting the most out of your laptop then a new battery might be your best bet, just make sure the manufacture date for the battery is recent.
Defragging is a horrible suggestion. In fact, NTFS (assuming most people reading this article are windows users) fragments more often if you ever defrag it. The best option is to never defrag the harddrive at all. We did a repot on the NTFS filesystem in my operating systems class last semester and this was one of the more interesting points we found in our research.
@robdew
There are some credible sources to the claim of lower screen resolution being more power efficient.
"Modify the display to use a lower resolution or fewer colors on the road. In fact, for most computing, a resolution of 800 x 600 with 16-bit color is fine. Such a setting uses less video memory, which requires less power to operate and keep cool." from Laptops for Dummies via [tech.yahoo.com] (Related)
Lowering the resolution on the screen of a laptop won't do anything because the pixels can't resize so your just turning on multiple of the same.
Why is everybody so skeptical about fragmentation decreasing battery life? Disk activity uses power (because of all that read/write head motion) and disk fragmentation increases disk activity.
According to this web page [www.intel.com] (Related) disk activity typically uses 10% of your laptop power. Double your disk activity — which you can easily do with fragmentation — and you add 10% to your power usage. Not a huge hit, but a long way from "marginal".
@rson (Related) : Specifics, please? Why is defragging bad? And note that there may be a gap between theory and practice here. When journalling filesystems like NTFS were introduced, it was accepted wisdom that they were immune to the effects of fragmentation. I'm not sure where that idea comes from, but we've all had experience that totally refutes it.
@Zicsoft
A computer magazine I am subscribed to issued an article on keeping your PC (Win&Linux) clean and healthy.
They said that if you're using NTFS or EXT3 on those systems it doesn't improve PC-perfromance nor saves you much time if you defrag your drive regularly.
They did extensive tests, through producing fragmentation on tested computers and conducted overall-performance- and harddrive-benchmarks before and after defragmentation.
Both systems use a kind of journaling AND remember the exact position of data on the harddrive.
The only advantage of defragmenting is to do so as you see fit when regularly handling files/folders bigger than 2GB (big RAW-pictures...). Working with files of this size would be more efficient when they are actually not fragmented.
With Fat32 it is a different matter. This FS is prone to fragment after a short while and thus gets slower and slower.
rson: You're thinking of old-fashioned win98 defrag, which simply moves everything to the inside of the disk. NTFS defrag simply makes files contiguous. By having fragments all over the place, there's less room for new files, meaning they have to be fragmented more often.
@Zicsoft:
The reason most modern OSes and Filesystems don't need to defragment is because they do it in the background automatically. I think Windows even does it in a way where it gives frequently accessed files a better place on the HD. I am not sure why it gets worse when you defragment, but I would guess it is because the algorithm used in the separate program hasn't been as optimized as the automatic one that's getting used every time you write a file.
All that being said, around 80-90% utilization, depending on the type of FS, fragmentation becomes unavoidable and hence performance will drop off. This is because it becomes it isn't possible to keep new files defragmented. At this point it may be possible* that a separate program which works differently than the automatic routine could do a better job of defragmenting... but as soon as you write a file to disk the new file is almost guaranteed to be fragmented and hence you'll see performance loss. In reality you'll always see better results if you keep disk utilization below 90% (preferably lower). This way you'll always of a defragmented disk and your performance should stay near the max.
* My area of resarch is no filesystems, so I am just making an educated guess.
NTFS, while better than FAT32, is not immune to defragmentation. Even the $MFT can get fragmented if it exceeds its preallocated size and that may affect performance to some extent atleast.
Ultimately, the extent of fragmentation is dependent upon your usage patterns- the number and size of files deleted, modified, created etc. With programs that involve significant disk I/O activity, fragmentation can cause delays, no doubt about it. With the huge audio and video files even on average home systems these days, and the lack of regular system maintainence- disk cleanup, defrag etc, I think NTFS fragmentation cannot be dismissed so easily.
In any case, the effects of fragmentation will be more noticeable in older systems with slower drives. Hard drives, due to their mechanical nature of operation are always the weakest link of the I/O chain, so fragmentation simply worsens the situation. Laptops have slow drives, so I suspect that fragmentation will not be too good for performance or battery life either. Here I agree with zicsoft.
I am no network expert, but AFAIK, defrag software is used extensively on servers. There ought to be a good reason for this.
That said, manually defragging doesnt seem to be much of a problem these days. I installed the defragger Diskeeper on my desktop the other day, and it has a background defrag function, so it automatically defrags when required. So far its been great.
Disclaimer: I am no expert on file systems. All of the above is just MHO:
@mangochutney (Related) : Well, that's not consistent with my experience. I'd want to know more about the tests they ran before I give up on defragging.
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