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Double your battery life

BigDawgES

BigDawgES

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 31, 2003
56
0
So a gent approaches me at work today, asks me how I like my 1.2GHz iBook. I tell him it's great, we get to talking about battery life. I get a cool 5-6 hours on a charge. He relates a story of a friend of his (with a mac portable) who uses some special software to throttle down the computer's processes and get 12+ hours of battery life.

So what say you? Blatant BS or does this software exist?

(I already use the disk spindown option in Cocktail to spin my hd down after 2 minutes of inactivity--I think this might help some)

Thanks for your input!
-Ethan
 
BigDawgES said:
So a gent approaches me at work today, asks me how I like my 1.2GHz iBook. I tell him it's great, we get to talking about battery life. I get a cool 5-6 hours on a charge. He relates a story of a friend of his (with a mac portable) who uses some special software to throttle down the computer's processes and get 12+ hours of battery life.

So what say you? Blatant BS or does this software exist?

(I already use the disk spindown option in Cocktail to spin my hd down after 2 minutes of inactivity--I think this might help some)

Thanks for your input!
-Ethan
Click to expand...

while it might be possible to limit the processor usage or indeed somehow clock it down. i wouldn't recommend it. apple has things pretty well covered. spinning your disk down might not be good either. each time it goes up and spins down and then back up, you're putting a lot of wear and tear on that drive. you may lessen the life of it by doing so.

while possible. i wouldn't do it. i'm happy enough with the 4 hours i get on a charge with my revision c 15" pb.
 
DXoverDY said:
spinning your disk down might not be good either. each time it goes up and spins down and then back up, you're putting a lot of wear and tear on that drive. you may lessen the life of it by doing so.

while possible. i wouldn't do it. i'm happy enough with the 4 hours i get on a charge with my revision c 15" pb.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the responses. Before I changed that setting, I asked Cocktail about that same issue, and they assured me that with modern hard drives, it's not a problem. I dunno, any 3rd opinions?
 
Doubling sounds pretty impossible to me. When a laptop battery goes flat, it hasn't actually displaced it's entire charge. keeping a 'reserve' as it were, allows the Mac to go to 'sleep' - meaning you don't loose what you were working.

I got an app for my Palm once that allowed you to carry on using the battery until it was totally dead. You got another couple of hours use, but it mucked things up. it ended up wiping my Palm clean.
 
12 hours is total BS, sorry but there is no way that is possible even in an apple laptop,

SHadow
 
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