I have a Dell Inspiron 1521 laptop, which came with Windows Vista. I’ve got it dual-booting between XP and Vista at present (with Ubuntu Linux in a VM due to hardware-specific issues — it runs great in the VM).
Battery life in Vista is about 3.5-4 hours, while battery life in XP is 1-1.5 hours. It appears that this difference is due to Vista’s superior CPU speed adjustment (the laptop has an AMD Turion 64 X2) capabilities; it keeps the CPU throttled down more, resulting in higher battery life.
Does anyone know any way to improve battery life in XP? The Power Management control panel is set to Portable/Laptop, and the settings are all reasonable for good power management. Is there any additional software that one can install that can tell the system to do more aggressive CPU throttling while on battery?
4 thoughts on “Laptop Battery Life”
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You’re probably on the right track about the CPU energy savings features. Could try installing the AMD CPU drivers in XP and see if it helps:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/AMD_Processor_Driver_1320053.zip
Do you have the Dell Quickset application installed? Tt does a bunch of CPU throttling stuffs.
Also, try installing alll the drivers from teh Dell sit, many of them have PM improvments over teh windows standard drivers.
Chris
Make sure you have the Intel SpeedStep drivers installed. They are not by default in XP, IIRC. Should be available on the Dell website or if not, the Intell one.
Sorry should have read more carefully. AMD processor drivers should help.