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?