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lieb39

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 17, 2005
284
0
Melbourne, Australia
Hello everyone,

I've read somewhere that the new 15" Powerbooks have lost the ability to control the speed of the processor within the Energy Saver preferences. Can anyone confirm my fear? :confused:

Thanks,

lieb39
 
wow I just posted a thread on this. I guess that teaches me to post before reading!

I just got my new 15" and sure enough that functionality is missing...
 
Aw Damn.. :( is there a hack or similar to get this feature back? It makes a noticeable difference on the older Powerbooks and I'd hate to think that I'm stuck in 'battery' mode..

-lieb39
 
There are pre-set settings you can change:
-Better Battery LIfe
-Better Performance
-Normal

You just can't really tweak them as you could before.
 
My understanding is that the processor speed control has become more finely tuned than before with the processor being able to throttle down to 1/4 speed instead of just 1/2 speed. This results in additional power savings. It is also more automatic now. Since it happens between one instruction and the next depending on CPU demand I don't need control over that. Properly done automatic will save more power while giving better performance than you can by manually tweaking it.

I would love to see Apple expand this with more levels of processor speed so that when the machine is just sitting there doing very little it would burn almost now power. e.g., after I've loaded a web page and reading it the processor does not need to be doing much. Activity monitor shows 3% usage. That means 97% wasted power on the CPU. Better to throttle it back and save the watts. The next step would be to also throttle back other sub systems when not in use. There is a lot of savings that could be made this way that will result in greatly extended batter life without having to come up with new more expensive batteries.
 
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