236 | Chapter 5: Performance
The settings here that will have the most bearing on your battery life are:
Hard disk
Being a mechanical device, your hard disk eats up a lot of power. Set the
Turn off hard disk after option too low, and you??™ll spend a lot of time
waiting for Windows to wake up your hard disk; set it too high, and
you??™re just wasting power. A setting of 10 or 20 minutes is usually a
good compromise.
Processor power management
Your processor can run at different speeds; it runs fast when it??™s needed,
but drops down to a slower speed when your PC is idle. The two settings
here let you choose the upper and lower bounds of your processor??™s
speed. Unlike with your hard disk, you never have to wait for your
processor to be woken up, so there??™s very little cost in keeping the Minimum
processor state setting as low as possible.
It??™s worth noting that the Maximum processor state is set to
only 50% in the Power saver plan by default; this means that
when this plan is active, your CPU will never run faster than
about half its rated speed. Of course, this does save power,
but as long as the Minimum processor state is set to, say,
5%, you probably won??™t need to limit your CPU in this way.
Of course, processors vary, so experiment with this setting to
see how well yours manages its own power consumption.
Search and Indexing
As described in Chapter 2 (and later in this chapter as well), Windows
indexes the files on your PC to make searches faster.
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