BATTERY CONSUMPTION IN LAPTOPS

The purpose of this work was to obtain an application wise breakdown of power consumption in laptops. First of all in WINDOWS what i did was,I calculated the time taken by battery to reduce from 50% to 45% using two software's (1): BATTERY MON (for plotting the graph) & (2): BATTERY LOGGER(for logging the battery consumption) running 1 application at a time and taking different cases as shown below: 1. when display is ON = 0 wifi :OFF,bluetoothOFF application running =0 c.p.u usage : 1% 2. when display ON=0 wifi: ON bluetooth : ON application running=0 c.p.u usage : 1% 3. when display OFF wifi : OFF bluetooth : OFF application running : 0 c.p.u usage:almost 0% 4. when display ON=100 wifi : OFF bluetooth : OFF application running : 0 c.p.u usage : 1% 5. when display ON=0 wifi : OFF bluetooth : OFF application running : 1 c.p.u usage : 65% and few more........ This helped me in doing great comparisons as to get a rough idea of battery consumption by different application. screen shot of what i did Then i also tried to calculate battery consumption in LINUX (ubuntu) as well. I dont know whether i should call my self fortunate or unfortunate as i was able to find one software POWERTOP but the results it gave were difficult to understand. i was able to make up for 50% of the result by searching on the net .The software gives you percentage consumption of different application in ascending order plus the solutions and option to improve .It was thus a kinda good software till the time one can figure out the results. This was all about the experiment, now the results that i concluded from above tests are as under : . Total system power varies considerably depending on workloads. CPU power dominates, in spite of speedstep for many applications. Display power, which is affected most by backlight brightness, dominates when system is idle. Graphics, wireless and optical drives are major power consumers only in specific workloads.

POWERTOP SCREEN SHOT

Now since we know the culprits eating our battery we need to take some steps/measures for battery management. C.P.U: It dominates the every other application in battery consumption basically due to overclocking. most of the newer processors underclock themselve through preinstalled feature called speedstep still i feel their is a lot more room for work in this area. DISPLAY: this dominates power consumption basically in idle condition when there is not much c.p.u usage or when backlight is 100%. reducing the backlight is the best way to tackle this. HDD: there are different modes already provided such as active , idle , standby etc in which hdd functions differently for e.g in standby mode is lowest power state hdd is not spinning and no data is written on it, idle mode hdd is spinning but no data is written. using and configuring above options can prove to be very helpful. GRAPHICS, WIRELESS, NETWORKING also consume battery but not to that extent. unloading drivers of unused devices is best way to save battery from them. REMOVE CD/DVD when not in use: As power consuming as hard drives are, CD and DVD drives are worse. Even having one in the drive can be power consuming. They spin, taking

power, even when they are not actively being used. Do not let a Li-On battery completely discharge. the no. of times it comes 0 the battry life decreases. *Set up and optimize your power options Go to Power Options in your windows control panel and set it up so that power usage is optimized. These were the few steps that can ensure a proper battery management system. In spite of searching for 1 complete day i was unable to find any such software or device which gave me a more statistical data which was the only problem i faced with this project .I know that if i would have been able to get any such software my report would have been better and elaborate, still i tried my best was able to make many good comparisons and conclusions.

Now at the end i would like to thank god that i didnt destroy my laptop and wish that.... KILL-A-WATT was available in INDIA.

Gandharv Kapoor Roll No. 2011047