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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.

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