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some power management tips
Authored by: dnordwall on Nov 15, '02 11:13:59PM

In jaguar, they took away the fine control over power management there was in 10.1. Fortunately, editing of the file above can help.

Remember, that disk has to spin up every time it needs to do _anything_ on the disk. Website sets a cookie? yep. Asks to set a cookie and you deny? yes, because, depending on your browser, it will record the fact to disk that you are denying that site! web page caching, yep. Try turning off web page caching and denying all cookies. Of course, at that point, a lot of web sites (including this one) will not work the way you expect.

Another one I've caught myself on is logging of iChat. I like to keep the logs, but those write to disk as well, and cause spin up. Your mail client will as well, as it caches local messages. If you can stomach it, and have the ability, use ssh and get your mail remotely, using pine.

My hard drive spun down just a second ago, which is a fair chunk faster that it normally does. I set my spin down time to 2 (minutes) in the file mentioned above. Nice work

If you can possibly manage it, and your hyper about power management, hook up a usb keychain drive and put your home directory on that. Those use much much less power. Not only that, but I wager it would provide some system security. Then again, my iTunes folder is bigger than the biggest usb keychain drive by a couple times.

Overall, I'm fairly disappointed with the battery life on my older powerbook g4. I expected much better, but I'm seeing around 2 hours regularly. I have coworkers with new dells that can shove in 2 batteries and pull 10 hours out of it



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some power management tips
Authored by: serres on Nov 17, '02 03:04:54AM

pmset - modify power management settings

since 10.1.4 (?) we have a command line utility called "pmset", see

% man pmset

with it you can modify the relevant power manager related settings available in mac os x (i looked at the source intensively). it even has some commented out stuff for future use like the "wake from sleep at some date" setting we had in mac os 9. for some non-understandable reason these are not implemented in the mac os x power manager library :(

you should also use this utility to modifiy the PowerManagement.xml file.

i think what's *very* important to save battery power is to enable the "Reduce Processor speed" setting.



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