More power. less power, smart power

So after a week with x64 Windows 7, I have to confirm the Earth is suddenly a better place to live :) As I said a week ago - after getting here from Vista, there is no going back. Everything is so much better... The only thing that has suffered is the battery life. Remember I was getting an average of 8 hours on my x200s with low power setting. And it could have been stretched up to more than 10 hours... Now my power meter shows around 7 hours when I start working on a fully charged battery. That is about 15% less...

My theory here is the screen backlight. Screen can take as much as 50% of the total energy consumed by a laptop computer. In my opinion the long battery life of the Lenovo x200s is achieved partly due to the Intel L9400 "Santa Rosa" processor optimizations, and partly due to LED backlight technology (previous display technologies were using fluorescent lamps). The display in the x200s can be very bright, so usually I run one of the lowest backlight settings. And actually in Windows 7, I run the backlight at the minimum setting, while the screen is still quite bright. It really looks like the Windows 7 backlight control does not want to dim the display enough. I mean enough to be readable, while keeping the power consumption as low as possible. Maybe I should install the Lenovo applet to fully control that...

The other contributor to the energy bill is definitely the new Toshiba SSD drive. It is rated at more than 5 Watts (1.6A at 3.3V), while the previous Hitachi spindle was only 2,5 Watts (0.5A at 5V). I have no way to measure the real power consumption of the drive, but I am certain it does not draw constant current of 1.6 Amps... This figure must be a peak current. And because the SSD drive is so much faster, the peaks are much shorter, thus the overall power consumption of the drive should be lower (lower compared to the mechanical rotating drive).

By the way - have I said the SSD drive is fast? It is worth repeating. It is blazingly fast... It scores 7.1 on the official Windows rating (whatever that means...). It resumes my system from hibernation in 18 seconds flat, adding just 4 seconds more to log in with a fingerprint scan and have the desktop ready. As I almost never shut down the OS, this figure (22 seconds) may be treated as a cold boot time. I do not remember I have ever had a machine that fast (since Windows 3.0 was introduced in the early 1990's). Only DOS was faster... loading its 80KB worth of kernel and command.com files. Microsoft Office applications cold load under one second. That is instant, hard to measure with hand operated stopwatch. Resuming the machine from suspended (sleep) state takes 6 seconds (and that includes fingerprint scan to unlock the desktop). Without a doubt adding a fast SSD drive to a system is the smartest way to increase its power and performance. Even if the SSD drive really consumes 1 or 2 Watts more, there is no comparable way to improve the overall performance of a computer. My machine is a bullet now...

Talking about power and performance and user experience. Let me guess what is the most annoying thing for most typical users of personal computers these days. Internet ads? Chances are I am right on this one... And I do not mean the Google Adsense (sponsored links), as they are bearable... Some people even do like them... I mean all these moving and flashing and shouting multimedia inserts and popups. Most of them are implemented with Adobe Flash technology. Flash is very nice to embed and present multimedia. Just about any "rich" Web service uses Flash now, with YouTube being the prime example. To get such rich presentation experience, Flash uses quite a lot of processing power, that in turn uses more current to drain the battery and makes the CPU hot. It is all right when you really want to watch a movie clip or play some interactive stuff intentionally. But when half of your typically opened 20 browser tabs load Flash controls and animate them, the ads not only disturb and annoy you. They simply drain your batteries!

To get rid of unwanted ads, there is one environment that in my opinion stands above the rest. It is the AdBlock Plus, an add-on to the FireFox Web browser. I have been using it for months now and I vote this a number one piece of software I could not live without today. The AdBlock Plus is also a reason why I even do not think of trying other Web browsers - be it Chrome or IE or Opera... FireFox rules, just because of this single add-on. Web without ads, without noise, like it used to be long time ago. And speaking about power - I have no scientific numbers here, but I am sure AdBlock is a significant contributor to the overall power consumption of a laptop computer. Probably one of the smartest ways to have your system run faster and run longer. And it is free. And According to the tests, AdBlock alone gives 4% to 5% more minutes per battery charge.

There are some more tricks in my bag of road-warrior's power enhancements. One I would like to share here is the system memory (RAM). My machine initially arrived equipped with 4GB. This was an overkill, especially for the 32-bit Windows Vista, that could use only 3GB (a system design limit). I found Vista was really taking half to two-thirds of the available RAM, typically 2GB. When I removed one 2GB chip, downsizing the machine to "only" 2GB, Vista scaled the occupied space down to 1.2-1.5GB. And I gained an extra hour of battery life. 64-bit Windows 7 (and 64-bit Vista too) can make use of full 4GB and more. But in my case it is very happy with 2GB, staying steady at the 1.05GB mark, with several applications opened: FireFox with about 20 tabs, Microsoft Internet Explorer (I use that for compatibility with the SharePoint Server at work), Microsoft Outlook 2007, Word and Excel. No need for 4GB system for me at all. Consider this when your battery has no juice anymore...

And one day I will have to install the Lenovo screen brightness manager - too see how much more can be squeezed by lowering the backlight even further... Or may be Microsoft will fix Windows 7 to be at least on par with Vista in the battery life area?