Laptop - Maximize Battery??

[suneun]

I just bought a used iBook (600 mhz combo drive). I'm trying to strip it down as much as possible to run quickly with the longest battery life. I've done all the usual power conservation things: energy saver, dim the lcd, no cd's in the tray. In 9 I've pulled all the extensions and control panels I can.

The only programs I intend to use on the laptop are: SimpleText, Terminal/NiftyTelnet, Safari/WebBrowser. I can run either 10.2.8 or 9.2.2. What I'm really looking to do is minimize the hard disk spin-up as much as possible. I looked into RAM disk, and I could get some things in RAM disk in 9, but found that iCab kept accessing the hard drive (presumably for preferences). I had the programs and the cache stored in the RAM disk. Not good enough.

In X, the hard disk spins up a lot. I did use "pmset" to make the HD spin down after two minutes, but not enough (man pmset if you're interested). Safari also pulls up hard disk a lot.

How do you make either 9 or X work with the least amount of HD spin? This might involve removing daemons and scripts in X that do regular logging.

Thanks.

Oh, and if you're interested, I found a great script to check the battery's info (this poor battery's at about half-factory) here.

 

[cb911]

whoa. sounds like you want to go extreme with that.

well Panther is supposed to help battery life, in normal usage at least. but i don't think i can really help.

i had a look at 'pmset'. interesting. thanks for mentioning that. i'll have to keep it in mind.

 

[suneun]

Sigh. So no one else is this obsessive about their battery power?

 

[whocares]

Re: Laptop - Maximize Battery??

Originally posted by suneun
How do you make either 9 or X work with the least amount of HD spin?

<sarcasm>

Remove the HD from the iBook

</sarcasm>

 

[Rower_CPU]

Yeah, if you've got a ton of RAM, just open all your apps once and leave them in memory.

To me, the biggest drain on battery life is screen brightness. Turn your screen down to half or less of its full brightness and you'll get a lot more time out of your battery.

 

[crazzyeddie]

If you want to use a RAM Disk in OS X or OS 9, then you need to use a browser that doesnt access the hard disk, or rather turn off the accessing of the hard disk. If you turn off all browser cache, this should help. Also using IE might help, since i know you can turn off all the cache.