Tablet, Centrino, Battery life and CPU clock speed

I recently got my Acer Tablet with the power-saving Centrino technology. I am getting very decent battery times out of it, too. 4-6 hours with wireless on if I am not coding and running the compiler a lot.

 

One of the ways Centrino conserves battery power is to slow down the CPU. You can see the speed your CPU is running at if you bring up the properties dialog for “My Computer”.

In the lower right corner you see the maximum speed the processor can run at, and the current speed.

The maximum speed the processor will actually run on is determined by the selected Power Scheme.

When the computer runs on the “Max Battery” setting, the CPU clock speed never exceeds 600MHz. With other power schemes selected the CPU can run up to the “advertised speed” of 1.5 GHz.


What I haven’t found though, is a detailed listing of the actual capabilities of any given Power Scheme. Is this accessible via WMI? Can I create my own profile? Does anybody know?

4 Comments

  • Try Start -> Run -> "powercfg.cpl"

  • Phil,



    Thanks for the reply. powercfg.cpl is the just control panel applet. It only gives me options for turning off the monitor, the disk and going into stand-by and hibernation.



    It doesn't tell me anything about the restricting the CPU clock speed or any other "stuff" that the Centrino is doing.



    Maybe there could also be other options you could integrate into a power scheme, like the LCD brightness, WiFi and IR port ...



    I did talk to someone from the Windows Client team at TechEd about exposing some of those settings and she thought is was a good idea.

  • mZ2Jdb Thanks so much for the blog post.Thanks Again. Will read on...

  • VCOYko Thank you for your article.Really thank you! Keep writing.

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