yourfirstserver.com

How to improve Dell XPS M1210 battery life

Tweet

Dell XPS M1210 is known for being one powerful, small and lightweight laptop. Many people rave about the battery life of the Dell XPS M1210 battery. Some people don’t like how the 80 watt-hour (9 cell) battery pack sticks an inch out the back of the machine. For them it ruins the advantage of being a small sized laptop. Even if you have the 53Whr 6-cell battery which will only give you around two and a half hours of battery life. The point is… The Dell XPS M1210 laptop is a power hog.

Here are some tips on how to improve the power consumption of your laptop which I think has more benefits than just extending its battery life. Note that these steps are for advance laptop users who know how to tweak their system to give them optimum performance.

The first step is to know what configuration changes in your laptop that can help reduce power consumption and hence improve battery life. Thankfully there are tools that you can use to monitor such the performance of your laptop.

RightMark CPU Clock Utility Monitoring – This tool can help you monitor the battery discharge rate of your laptop. It will help you see exactly what helps, what doesn’t, and how much of a gain we’ve made with each adjustment you made in your laptop.

You can also use a software-based bench power supply measurement to help you measure the current consumption of your system and try to adjust the following to see if it will improve the power consumption of your laptop.

CPU clock and voltage

The first thing you may want to tweak is your CPU to use less power. Adjusting the clock rate of your CPU lets you reduce its voltage at the lower clock speeds which can help improving its battery life.

For example you can set two different CPU states (i.e. 1GHz/0.95V and 2GHz/1.212V} so when it’s running on battery, it will use the slower speed settings and higher speed setting when your laptop is running from the AC adapter. You can also try to set up more states to use in different situation so it will always give you the best kind of performance. Just remember to check the ‘Battery’ tab of your laptop when you want to set up your Power Saving profile!

You can also change the RMClock registry setting to reduce the voltage below Intel’s recommended levels and improve the power economy even more. You can find the RMClock registry setting at RMClock_Tweaks.reg in the RMClock directory. But I highly don’t recommend this especially for those who don’t know what they are doing because tweaking registry setting can risk your system’s stability.

Once you are done setting up RMClock – and confident that your system is already stable – you can save your RMClock settings when you exit the program

Screen brightness

Reducing the screen brightness of your laptop can save you some power as well. Use appropriate Screen brightness settings according to your surroundings. For example, if you are inside your home with a normal indoor lighting then you can use lower brightness settings to help save some power on your laptop.

Disabling devices

If you’re not using it, turn it off – this is a good mantra to follow when you want to conserve power in your battery. You should turn off devices that you are not currently using. For example is disabling your WiFi off when you are not using it or if are traveling and getting on a plane

Using the Device manager you can see which devices that you are not currently using and may be turned off. Another thing you can disable is Bluetooth which you can usually switch off via button or through Device Manager too.

You can also disable USB ports that you are currently not using in the Device Manager. You can leave one or two enabled if you need to connect mouse and an external hard disk while on battery.

Another advantage of turning off those peripheral devices is lowering the CPU temperature of your laptop especially if the heatsink inside your laptop is being shared to other devices.

You can also search for application or program that will disabled all those unused peripheral devices automatically when you use your laptop on battery and then turned them on again once you use your laptop on AC.

We highly advice that these tips should not be tried by beginners because some of the tips shared above can actually damage your laptop.