26th June 2001

Battery power routinely lasts ten minutes less than required. Always. They're designed that way, ya know. It's so you'll buy more batteries! They've spent millions on research to determine the exact amount of time required, then shave off just enough to frustrate you. To combat this, we have to find ways to lengthen that precious life. Start by turning off sound events temporarily. You don't have to re-assign all of the events, just mute the sound entirely. Next, eject any PC Cards that aren't in active use. Just inserting them draws at least some power, and depending on the card, possibly a lot of juice. Reducing the brightness of the display is also something many forget about, and you can further drop the load on the video subsystem by lowering the display resolution a notch or two. You've probably configured your power settings, but if your hard drive is spinning up every few minutes to auto-save documents, it's not doing you much good. Extending application auto-save times or disabling them completely can keep the hard drive spin-ups to a minimum, though you have to weigh the risk of losing unsaved data in case of... well, a power loss.