HOW TO Quickie: Conserve Battery Power in OS X
January 19, 2006 · 14 comments
So you’re in the middle of History 2112 and are typing notes like crazy because your professor talks a million words per minute. Unfortunately for you there are 30 minutes left in class but your PowerBook only has 15 minutes of juice left. What to do? The first one should be obvious – lowering the brightness on your screen. This can save major battery life. Disabling AirPort wireless and BlueTooth are also big helpers.
Make your way over to System Preferences » Energy Saver » Settings for » Battery and Optimization > Better Battery Life. You are only going to want to have that enabled when you’re using the battery, as it throttles the CPU.
The second line of action is to keep your CPU happy and not run too much stuff. That includes extraneous widgets, iTunes, QuickSilver and all the stuff you have running in the dock; basically anything that doesn’t help with TextEdit or whatever isn’t necessary for the task at hand. You can double check to see if you have any applications running hidden in the background by accessing Applications » Utilities » Activity Monitor. It will give you a list of running processes and some basic info such as how much memory they are taking up. If you track down any processes you don’t deem as vital for what you’re doing, click Quit Process.
Your last line of defense is inverting the screen’s colors. By pressing Control + Option + Apple + 8 the colors on your screen will invert. This way, the primary colors on your screen will be darker. On an LCD, black is the rest state for each pixel, so your computer wouldn’t have to put forth nearly as much electricity for the display. Following even a few of these tips should help your Mac laptop hold out through the end of that class.
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Thing is though… how many words has the professor said while you’re doing those tweaks?
Hehe, kidding. Good tips, noted.
There is no ‘alt’ key on a Macintosh keyboard. There is, however, an ‘option’ key.
Inverting the display may cause some slight improvement in power consumption, but would probably be negated due to the fact that OS X has to work harder (check the Activity monitor for increased CPU usage when inverted, therefore more power consumption). The major consumer of electricity in the display is the backlight, which is only affected via the brightness, not via black or white or whatever the screen’s contents are.
The battery monitor may show a difference, but until you do some Real Worldâ„¢ tests, it’s all speculation.
Adam, my Apple keyboard has an option/alt key. :-) I used alt because some people might have wanted to follow along on their desktop Mac that doesn’t have an Apple keyboard.
Nice tip, I will test it!!! It is cool anyway.
In italian Apple keyboards the option key is labeled alt, as well. This is always source of confusion!!!
There’s an app for turning off the Dashboard that cuts down on memory and cpu usage a fair amount as well.
Paul, why would a person with a desktop Mac that doesn’t have an Apple keyboard wanted to reserve their batteries? They don’t even use battery in the first place :)
The only part of this that really deals with keys is inverting the colors and any Mac user could find that handy, such as for computing at night if you don’t want that big ACD to make enough light to wake up your roommate, regardless of keyboard.
That’s not how LCDs work. They are constantly backlit, and block light from exiting. So inverting won’t change battery consumption. (If they were LEDs, that would work.)
Ray: You’re wrong. Yes LCDs are always backlit and the backlight cannot be turned off for a portion of the screen (unless it is LED backlit). However inverting the colors to where most of the screen is black will conserve engergy because it takes juice to that pixel to make it change colors… even though its not emitting light it is still using current to sustain it’s color. If the pixel was at rest (black) then it is not using current to sustain a color.
Well, you can allways log off and log in in console mode :)
just type at the login : >console
then log in with your username and ready set go :)
vim bla, this will cut down the battery