Skip to main content

Scavenging Battery Life with Windows 7

Since I installed Windows 7 on my NC10 I’ve been trying to find ways of getting the battery performance on a par with Windows XP. I’ve gone through Windows 7 Power settings with a fine toothcomb, I’ve gone through application settings to try and reduce requirements and am now looking at disabling unnecessary services.

imageAs an aside, I previously mentioned that I like Google Chrome on the device. One tip that seems to reduce hard drive & Wi-Fi activity is to disable DNS pre-fetching. This actually saves you time, but produces activity while the browser resolves any domains that are present in links on each page you visit. Only a small overhead but I think it helps a little.

Back on topic, I started looking at the services that were started on my installation of 7 Home Premium. I then Googled for anyone that had done similar. I found someone had gone through the services and documented what ones he’d turned off.

Charles Sparks ‘BlackViper’ – Windows 7 Service Configuration

I did’t disable all the services he had, but there was a number that I disabled. Some of the ones I disabled are below, but you may find that you are able to disable other services and would like to keep these on.

  • HomeGroup Provider
  • Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service
  • Windows Search
  • Diagnostic Policy Service

I had a look at the scheduled task service and didn’t disable it as I wanted to see if any tasks were set to run even though the machine was on battery power. I’ll write another post on that.

But the result of disabling some services, was encouraging… The battery life appears to be back up to XP levels for the three cell battery. I now get two and a half hours of browsing with 7.

I’ve also thrown in the towel and ordered a 6 cell battery. So I’ll be able to let people know what results I get with that.

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

Convert Linked Mailboxes to User Mailboxes in Bulk

My organisation has gone through a massive migration project to unify Active Directories and Exchange organisations. As a result of these migrations a lot of mailbox migrations have resulted in a lot of mailboxes ending up as linked mailboxes even though their not.The official TechNet article on this explains how to disconnect the mailbox and re-attach it to the user account correctly as a user mailbox. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201749(EXCHG.80).aspxAnother way to make this appear to be corrected is to manually change the “Recipient Type” AD property on the affected mailboxes. This though, is unsupported.Using the official method from Microsoft results in the loss of any specific mailbox information such as SMTP, x400 & x500 addresses, mailbox sizes and any other individual mailbox settings.Only e-mail addresses and mailbox sizes were important to me (I must admit, I forgot about mailbox sizes at first). I came up with the script below that would properly conver…
17 comments
Read more

Creating a Windows PE 3 Bootable USB device

I’ve used Windows PE for a long time. And I’ve grown to love it. It’s an extremely useful tool, not just for OS installation, but for diagnostics.Since there’s a version of WinPe for x64 & x86 (& itanium) I like to keep both x64 & x86 on my USB stick. Essentially copying the each version to the root of the USB stick as needed. Meaning at any one time I have three copies of WinPE on my USB stick. Other applications I copy directly to my USB stick, so that I don’t have to remount the image every time i need another application added.Shortly after Windows 7 was released came a new version of WinPE, WinPE 3.0 on the Windows Automated Installation Kit.Preparing the USB stick. You’ll need to prepare the USB stick. To do this open a command prompt using Run As Administrator and use the following commands.diskpart
list disk
select disk 7
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format quick fs=fat32
assign
exitMake sure…
8 comments
Read more

Upgrading Exchange 2007 Clusters to SP2 – Workaround

I posted last month about a problem delegating installs of Exchange 2007 SP2. Delegated Admins will receive an error message stating the following…You must be a member of the 'Exchange Organization Administrators' or 'Enterprise Administrators' group to continue.Have been looking into the issue and have had a case open with Microsoft. Turns out that you only get this issue on a fully patched server. If you try upgrading or installing as a delegated admin on a fresh install of either server 2008 or 2003 you don’t see the problem either with Exchange SP1 or SP2. I haven’t had time to identify exactly what patch causes this yet, if I’ll bother at all.If you have patched your server though, MS came up with this workaround.Disable update checking for the BPA by heading into the registry and HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\ExBPA and either creating or modifying a DWORD named “VersionCheckAlways” and set it to ‘0’Copy the installation files to a local drive and replace Setup…
2 comments
Read more