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?

Published Sunday, May 23, 2004 3:58 PM by ChristophDotNet

Comments

# re: Tablet, Centrino, Battery life and CPU clock speed

Sunday, May 23, 2004 7:09 PM by Phil Weber
Try Start -> Run -> "powercfg.cpl"

# re: Tablet, Centrino, Battery life and CPU clock speed

Monday, May 31, 2004 11:42 PM by Christoph
Cazzu,

I like the tablet functionality a lot (especially with XP SP2) and the performance of the Acer box is OK. It's faster than the 2.0Ghz laptop I had before because the Centrino chips run with a higher bus speed than most Pentium 4 laptops. It's by no means a 3.0 GHz hyper-threaded Alienware laptop though. Right now it's fine for the work I am doing, including developing for BizTalk, but I did add more memory.

It's a great compromise between mobility, performance and price. Down the road I'll probably get another powerful desktop or a server (to use from my tablet via Terminal Server ;) )

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Christoph

# re: Tablet, Centrino, Battery life and CPU clock speed

Friday, June 04, 2004 8:32 AM by Christoph
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.

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