Detailed numbers on eking battery life from a laptop
Jeff Atwood took another look at power consumption on a laptop, using his trusty Kill-A-Watt power monitor to run a series of tests. I found the numbers regarding power use of the display most interesting. There's a clear drop in power as you turn off the brightness — 20 watts for the brightest LED backlight setting down to 17 watts for the lowest — but it curves off after step four (of seven). That implies that you'll save some power by moving the display brightness down to about half-way, but going lower than that isn't doing much more than irritating your eyes.
I was curious if I'd see the same curve with a fluorescent backlight like I have in my laptop, so I went to grab my trusty Kill-A-Watt and...couldn't find it. I have no idea where it could be, but it's not anywhere I recall leaving it. Maybe it is monitoring power use in heaven.
Revisiting "How Much Power Does My Laptop Really Use"? [Coding Horror]
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I'd be interested to see the power consumption of a machine running Windows Vista, and doing a comparison with the same task in an earlier operating system.
It seems that in this age where people are using super-efficient light bulbs, using Windows Vista must be the worst possible option to save the environment.
I imagine that the 'green credentials' of a company would be severely lacking if it did made basic environmental mistakes like use Windows Vista....
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I'd think that saying vista is the "worst possible option" is a bit overboard.
I would imagine there would be a slight power savings by running a lower version of windows, but i'm doubting that it would be much more than the savings of turning the brightness down on the monitor, especially on an up to date laptop.
I've personally compared battery life on my laptop that shouldn't be running vista but is to itself running XP and i only got about another 15 minutes out of the battery (i got even less with linux), which might be helpful if you absolutely need to type that extra paragraph in your novel, but in reality this would only be an amount of time that you'd care about if you were in a situation where you had no access to a power outlet, such as on an airplane or in a car(:x). Definitely not in a home situation where you already have some server running 24/7.