Optimize your iBook / PowerBook Battery Performance
Here are a few tips on how I make my Apple iBook battery last longer. (Same can be applied on PowerBooks, of course.)
Very first thing to do is to put the brightness of your display down to as low as anyhow possible; this will make a huge difference.
Under System Preferences -> Hardware/Energy Saver in “Settings for” choose “Battery” and “Optimization”: “Better Battery Life”. (This will also reduce the speed of your CPU, but on the road one can usually live with this.)
Unless you have to use either one of them, switch off Bluetooth and AirPort. (You can do so in the Control Panel under System Preferences, or else in the Control Menus for BlueTooth and AirPort, respectively, to be found in the upper right-hand side of your screen.)
Do *not* open the Dashboard, since even after you close it again all the Widgets will keep eating away from your CPU power (which means reduced battery life).
In either Activity Monitor or the Terminal (both can be found in Applications/Utilities) quit - or “kill” as it is known in the Terminal - all the applications and preference panes that you do not absolutely need. Be careful however: if Activity Monitor warns you that “Quitting xyz will log you out”, then do *not* quit that process, since it will log you out.
Another pretty cool one is to hit the keyboard combination “Control Option Command 8″ (and not as said before: “Control ALT Apple 8″) which will invert the colours on your screen. (Hitting the same combination will change it back to the standard setting.) This can at times also give you an extra 30 minutes or more. It can under certain bright lights also make it easier to read text, btw. Give it a try!
Technorati Tags: Apple iBook, Apple Power Book, Apple Mac Book Pro, Laptop, Battery Performance, Battery Life
29 Responses to “Optimize your iBook / PowerBook Battery Performance”
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January 20th, 2006 at 4:20 am
uh, that would be the OPTION key. Hate to be a stickler, but we ARE talking about Macs here.
January 20th, 2006 at 4:25 am
Wow! That’s a real neat trick. On my system it inverts the colors and then changes over to graysacale. Pretty weird stuff.
January 20th, 2006 at 4:27 am
[…] Navegando por ahí, acabo de encontrar una curiosidad para nosotros, afortunados usuarios de Mac. […]
January 20th, 2006 at 4:35 am
Trucos para ahorrar batería en portatiles Apple…
En este articulo podemos leer diversos trucos para ahorrar batería en nuestros portatiles Apple.
Entre ellos, uno muy curioso con una combinación de teclas para invertir los colores de la pantalla, lo cual nos dará unos 30 minutos mas de batería….
January 20th, 2006 at 4:41 am
[…] read more No Comments so far Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong> […]
January 20th, 2006 at 5:24 am
How would inverting the screen save battery life? On an LCD, the lamp is always on, even when every pixle is black.
January 20th, 2006 at 6:12 am
Any chance you could post your testing methodologies and collected data that your readers can draw their own conclusions? Some of your claims are way out there and I’d like to see if there’s a strong causality link. Your recommendations indicate some pretty serious design flaws with the product. I’m wondering if you maybe got a defective product.
January 20th, 2006 at 6:20 am
I’m sorry but you’ve got two huge blunders on this page. Dashboard widgets do not remain active when it is not disabled. Their threads are sent a sleep signal when Dashboard is disabled. There’s a handful of badly coded widgets that launch child processes (shell scripts and such) that don’t go to sleep with the widget but that isn’t the fault of Dashboard. Your comment about inverting the screen makes no sense at all. The backlight remains at the same brightness no matter what color pixel is being displayed on the screen. The battery monitor might report a time increase but you will not see a real improvement.
You also fail to notice that both Bluetooth and Airport can be more easily disabled by disabling their Network ports in the Network Preferences in System Preferences. Make a new location and disable Bluetooth, Ethernet, Modem, and Airport ports and all of those devices will be powered off on the logic board. You might want to revise your post to be more accurate.
January 20th, 2006 at 7:11 am
Eric: thanks for pointing that out… I just always, always call the Option key “Apple Key”, because it has got the sweet little Apple in outline on it.
January 20th, 2006 at 7:19 am
Julius: to be totally honest, I am not able to explain how this technically works. The trick was pointed out to me by a friend, and I was sceptical myself. However, I have been trying this out on a regular basis, and normally I can see the indicator for “battery time remaining” jump up a notch whenever I invert the screen! (The guy I got the tip from said it was up to 40 minutes, but I usually get between 5 and 15 minutes extra.) On a sidenote: whenever I am on the road with my iBook, I switch off anything unnecessary (AirPort, etc.), and usually work with apps like Text Edit, that don’t eat up tons of CPU.
January 20th, 2006 at 7:31 am
Uh, the Option key doesn’t have the Apple outline on it. The CMD key has the Apple outline.
January 20th, 2006 at 7:33 am
DavidT: can you maybe point out which claims are “way out there” and the “recommendations (that) indicate some pretty serious design flaws with the product”?
Some of the tips I recommend, btw, can also be found on the official Apple Computer website
My testing is not done in a lab, but based on heavy daily use of my iBook G4. Since I am oftentimes without an AC outlet, I have to try and get the maximum out of my battery. (In fact: batteries - since I always carry two around.
)
January 20th, 2006 at 7:42 am
Steve: re the “inverting screen”, please see my comment above (to Julius).
If memory serves right, I have in Activity Monitor seen Apple widgets (not 3rd parties) still using bits of CPU even when the Dashboard wasn’t active.
But I will again keep an extra eye on it and let you know.
Thanks a lot for pointing out how one can disable AirPort & Bluetooth via the Network Preferences. Didn’t know this one - great stuff!
January 20th, 2006 at 7:48 am
Christopher Black: Oops, sorry… I always get those mixed up. You are 100 % right of course. I usually refer to the Option key as ALT key - that’s why I am confused…
January 20th, 2006 at 8:02 am
lol apple computers
January 20th, 2006 at 8:34 am
Nice article, thanks for the info. I will give it a try and see how I go.
Also thanks for the “locations” tip Steve.
January 20th, 2006 at 8:45 am
Hi Ben. Thanks for the kind words. Do please give the tips a try, and do please also come back to let us know whether they did help make your battery last longer.
January 20th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
Ibook G4;
I have tested to see if when the screen brightness is all the way down, is the backlight still on??
Well its very simple, turn the brightness all the way down, and look at the apple logo on the back of the screen, it no longer shines! I would therefore assume that the backlight is off. I thin shone a torch at the apple logo and lo and behold, i see the apple logo in the front of the screen. try it, but be careful with the heat of any torch. I dont know what all this means for battery life though…
January 20th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
Patrice,
Don’t let these bone heads get you down - the keyboard shortcut was correct - on most Mac keyboards the OPTION key also has an ALT label, similarly, “Apple” and “Command” are interchangable terms for that key with the cloverleaf and apple on it.
In addition, it is easy to confirm that widgets continue to consume system resources even when “asleep” just by using a tool like ipulse or top. I would say that the CPU utilization itself is trivial, but more significant, they also consume RAM even when asleep - something else ipulse can confirm. On my 1/2 gig PB a gaggle of sleeping widgets can really reduce the amount of available RAM and increase the amount of swapping going on - which will really cut into battery life and performance.
For the doubters, I am not talking about virtual memory, I’m talking about “resident memory” - the amount of actual RAM the widget consumes. For example, I started 4 widgets just now to measure their memory consumption: Address Book is consuming 8.3 mb, Dictionary is tying up 7.9 mb, calendar is using 7.0 mb, and the calculator is holding down 6.4 mb. Those 4 sleeping widgets are consuming about 30 megs of available memory even when asleep. If you actually use them, their usage increase further.
–
Steve,
Why on earth would removing bluetooth from the active network ports turn it off? I mean, it’s not like I have network support for blue tooth turned on so I can use my mouse. For example, Bluetooth networking isn’t turned on in ANY of my locations, yet I’m using a bluetooth mouse right now.
January 21st, 2006 at 5:37 am
lol! You silly girl! It would be so much easier if they were the same wouldn’t it. Also wanted to say sorry for just pointing out an error and not responding to your post. Great post, nice to see that you welcome feedback AND have a sense of humor!
January 21st, 2006 at 1:18 pm
Eric: now I have to correct you - it would have to be “silly boy”… I was born as a man, and haven’t had a sex change (yet)…
)
Of course I welcome feedback - isn’t communication one of the great things about the internet? (As long as one makes sure to every now and then socialize with something/somebody other than their computer…
January 21st, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Marc (Spanish comment). Here is a rough translation: “Surfing here (on this site) I found something interesting - you lucky Mac users”.
January 21st, 2006 at 2:28 pm
meneame.net (Spanish comment). Rough translation: “In this article we get several tips on how we can save battery time on our portable Macs. Amongst them an interesting (weird-ish) one: by inverting the colours we can save up to 30 minutes of battery life.”
January 21st, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Dave Morton. Don’t really “get” your comment - but yes, my Apple Macs (most of the time) make me smile, laugh, and generally happy.
January 23rd, 2006 at 10:31 pm
Oh CRAP! Red face and ears! I am sorry Patrice. My feeble brain read your name as a Patricia-ish thing. I shall retire to my hole and cower in shame.
January 24th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Hey Eric - no worries… can happen to people like us who are half-married to their computers…
Besides: it also happens to 99 % of the companies and government offices that write to me: I usually get my mail addressed to Mrs. Patrice…
February 10th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
dear Sojust: thanks for your kind words. Appreciated
February 22nd, 2006 at 4:33 am
[…] Update 2: Giustamente Epimenide mi fa notare che la funzione è accessibile anche dal pannello “Accesso Universale”, quindi è stata pensata principalmente per chi ha problemi visivi. Il fatto che aiuti a risparmiare energia sarebbe un utile “effetto collaterale”… da confermare. Qui la pensano così, ma la cosa sembra difficile, visto che gli schermi LCD vengono illuminati uniformemente. […]
March 23rd, 2006 at 7:35 am
[…] Navegando por ahí, acabo de encontrar una curiosidad para nosotros, afortunados usuarios de Mac.Si pulsais CTRL+ALT+APPLE+8 los colores de la pantalla se invertirán. Suena estupido, y de hecho lo es. Pero no tanto, parace que no, pero tiene una utilidad. Hacer uso de ello en un laptop de Apple nos proporcionará 30 minutos aproximadamente de bateria extra. […]