Need to Save Battery Life

[catacon]

So I'm going on tour with my school band tomorrow and I'm bring my laptop for music. The battery life is pretty bad, so I need to save as much juice as possible. I will only be using this for music (using foobar2000) and nothing else. I have the screen as dark possible and the power option set to Power Saver. I will try to keep the lid closed so the screen isn't on most of the time. Is there anything else I can do make the battery last as long as possible?

Thanks!

[glc]

Hibernate it when you aren't actually using it.

[Hi Ho]

Keep the lid closed as much as possible. As GLC said, hibernate whenever it's not being used.

It may be a good idea to invest in an MP3 player.

[Ahura]

If it is an AMD then try to enable Cool'n Quiet if it is not, though I think only a few model of CPU support that especially for Laptop.

[Lespaul20]

I think you pretty much know every way to save power. Like Hi Ho said, the LCD takes a lot of power so try to limit that usage. I don't think there is much else you can do other than what has been said.

[catacon]

I can play music with the lid closed, so that's all good. Is hibernating or shutting down better?

I had an iPod, but it died and I need something.

[Hi Ho]

If you hibernate or shut it down the music will stop.

[catacon]

Right, but which is better when I'm not listen to music?

[mbossman2]

shut down all non-essentials: wireless cards, network interfaces and the like. use headphones instead of the speakers and spool down all drives that you are not using.

[glc]

No difference in power usage hibernated or shut down - but hibernate will start back up a bit quicker.

[piasabird]

Might be nice if you had one of those solar chargers.

[catacon]

Well I made it through the trip and I never ran out of battery life. Keeping the lid closed while playing music helped a lot. Hibernating actual keeps the laptop on so it used battery life. I found shutting down was best for battery life. Thanks for the help!

[Lespaul20]

Remember there is a difference between hibernate and stand-by. Hibernating will shut down the computer completely, saving contents of RAM to the hard drive. Stand-by just keeps the RAM powered to retain it's contents. Are you sure you were using hibernate?

[Floppyman]

I know it's pricy, but if you will be traveling more often and require more battery power, this might be worth considering:

http://www.batterygeek.net/130Wh_Portable_Power_Station_PPS130_3V_28V_p/pps130_batterygeek.htm

Once I get a chance to do some more overseas traveling again, I definitely plan on getting one of these. Nothing quite like being able to use your laptop and watch your choice of movies for an entire 12hr+ flight.

[catacon]

I took a trip to Atlanta last year and we had some car batteries that we hooked up to inverters for our laptops. That worked pretty well except those batteries aren't too easy to transport.

[Statica]

If your laptop has a way to use it's media player (usually through a scaled down linux OS w/media player functions) .. you would save a WHOLE lot of power by not booting into the OS.

[catacon]

I don't think I have that option, unfortunately.

[liambl]

You could also use Intel TAT (if its an Intel CPU) to underclock the CPU down to say 500MHz, that should save some power.

[EzyStvy]

Getting a second battery comes to mind:eek:

[catacon]

Yes, but that involves money.

[snowwhite]

yeah, getting one more battery would be my option in this situation. actually, i did that myself in due time...

[David M]

If you are traveling with a band then have them play the music for you. Do they know Freebird or Stairway or even Welcome to the Jungle? ...I'm showing my age. :D