Laptop performance problem

I was wondering what you had observed about this problem and if you'd come up with any testable hypotheses. In general, I know that laptop battery life is severly compromised by graphics-, harddrive- and CD-intensive operations. Also, if you hear the fan turning on full blast and a frequently, your CPU is cooking. Any motors that go on, like fan, HD or CD, draw the most current. So, anything which causes this activity will drain the battery pretty quickly. Sound is a big drain, too. (A DVD movie will kill a battery in about 10 minutes or less, depending on the make.)

Pro/e, expecially for assemblies, is pretty disk-intensive; spinning assemblies can be pretty graphics-intensive, especially when grpahics resolution is set pretty high. So, if you tweaked config.pro for quality, you'll have to untweak for longevity. You can do things like turn on LODS and set it to a low level, let it compose your assembly slowly out of an amorphous mass and use that unregenerated, undetailed mass to spin your assembly; you can use a lot more simplified reps; you can use low quality shading or none, just use wirefram except you really need a shaded model. And you can keep the number of open windows to a minimums. And, if you are supporting network traffic during all this, an even bigger drain because, in addition to graphics, CPU, fan and HD going, you've got the NIC to support as well, PLUS whatever demands it puts on the system.

However, the right, exact answer to your question depends heavily on HOW you use the computer while on battery power.

David, Thanks for your detailed answer. Seems like I didn't make myself clear enough on what the actual problem is... it is not how long the PC will run while on batteries but rather the SPEED at which it runs while on batteries. Measured example: have assembly open, right-click any part in it open the part, while on AC will take abt 1sec. Same thing while on batteries takes abt 20sec! I'd definitely sacrifice battery life for performance - I'd rather have

20mins of decent work than 2hrs worth of useless computing power... Greetings, Sepp

Check to see if SpeedStep is enabled. May have to check in the CMOS when the computer boots, and to see if there are any programs or setting in Windows.

What's SpeedStep supposed to do. You say enable it; Sepp says he DISabled it. Doesn't sound like it made any difference. Anyway, my Toshiba will do the same thing for power saving, but it's not XP doing it. It's some special Toshiba power app. However, I know it's in charge because it disabled the XP power menu. And it does something which XP has no facility to do: it reduces power to everything, for example, the screen dims to significantly less brightness and contrast and I'm sure it's also reduced power to CPU, HD, fans which means that everything slows down.

Did your IT depat try replacing the battery? Swap out the CD ofr a second battery? I could speculate on this stuff for quite a while, but someone with an nw8000 needs to pipe up here, say if this is normal and whether there's a way around. I'd be interested in what Compaq support has to say about it, too, on the assumption it isn't normal.

I am sorry, I said to see if it is enabled. You will want to disable it. I have a Dell D810 and I have to change the SpeedStep settings in the CMOS. Even though it may be disabled in Windows, it may still be enabled in the firmware.

Also check the settings in the power settings to ensure that the speed is set to maximum.

"Sepp" wrote

This is not a normal behavior of the nw8000. We had lots of them before migrating to nw8240, and if you don't mind loosing battery time it can run as fast on batteries as it does on AC.

Some way you can resolve your problem:

First, check that you have the latest BIOS:

Second, enable SpeedStep in the BIOS. SpeedStep allows the operating system to clock down the cpu when there is not much load. IIRC some BIOS revisions also had settings for how the machine behaves on battery, if they are apparent then set them to performance preferences.

Third, check that Windows has the latest updates and service packs installed.

Fourth, install the latest gfx drivers. You can either get the drivers from HP

which are version 8.133.1.1-05062 from June 8th 2005, or get the drivers from IBM for their T41p Thinkpads which use the same GPU and which should work fine with the nw8000, too. The drivers IBM offers are also newer: Fifth, after installing the gfx drivers, go into the display properties and then the ATI control panel, and set PowerPlay (which is similar to what SpeedStep is for the CPU but PowerPlay is for the GPU) to "full performance" for AC and also for battery operation.

Sixth, install a tool that lets you control Windows power management setting much better than it's possible with what comes standard with the operating system. There are two programs that can provide that. One is called "SpeedSwitchXP", it' older and doesn't work with newer notebooks with PCIe hardware (but it works with the nw8000 sind this is AGP based). The newer and IMHO also better tool is "Notebook Hardware Control" which requires the .NET Framework 2.0 to be installed (downloadable from MS):

these tools you can alter the behavior of your notebook as you like, and the nw8000 can run in full speed even when on battery.

Benjamin

So, now that you've taken all of these measures to obviate saving battery life, how long will the battery last with average Pro/e use?

"David Janes" wrote

It depends on what you do and also how much memory you have, but our nw8000 with 2GB memory managed to run ~100-120min at full performance...

BTW: the reason for all these measures is _not_ to obviate saving battery life, but for giving the user much more control over the system performance and thus also over the power consumption. Not every user profile requires to get the longest running time possible out of the battery, often enough requirement is that the notebook runs at full performance on battery for a certain time. The energy control panel that comes with Windows is a joke, and like most notebook manufacturers HP doesn't provide a better utility for their notebooks. That's where freeware utilities like "SpeedswitchXP" and "Notebook Hardware Control" come into play. And having the latest BIOS and system updates ensures that the system contains fixes for several speedswitch-related errors that have been corrected.

Benjamin

Sepp escribió:

The AC vs Batteries is the only parameter changed ??.

I've seen the same performance loss if you disconect the laptop from the net. I think that is communicating with ¿Anybody? in the web, and if it can not make the connection then is waiting for it and then the performance goes down.

Benjamin pointed me in the right direction: (Benjamin's hint #5 did the trick) Display properties> settings>advanced>ATI PowerPlay> PowerPlay Settings: changed from Optimal battery life to Optimal Performance. Doesn't matter if I'm connected to network or AC or not, always same great performance now. Great job Benjamin! You're the man! Sepp