Things I have already tried and dismissed:
Feature | Expected Gain | Dismissed because... |
Screen colour reduction (going from 32bit colour - 16.7 million colours to 8 bit colour - 256 colours) | Lower power GPU usage since it is doing less colour work | Tests showed no real gain, possibly a few seconds, but importantly Vista is mostly blacked out and very hard to use |
Auto process priority management - lowering task priority for heavy processes | Lower CPU usage should mean greater battery life | Usage of a machine became unbearably slow. Conversely, trying to put the CPU priority up instead so a task was done faster is counter productive, since user input is slow and the application is waiting longer at high priority |
Decrease the sound volume | Lower power usage from lower volume | Not much to be gained here unless you play music constantly, and probably quite annoying |
Features like hardware disabling I think are overkill and is potentially dangerous so I won't be considering that (e.g. switching Bluetooth off, disabling Bluetooth driver stack). Hardware disabling would also require a lot of manual configuration, and one of the design paradigms behind Aerofoil is to keep it as simple as possible.
So what can I do, how can I improve Aerofoil - I was pretty much resigned to 1.4.5 being the last version - but given it's success I'd like it to become the defacto must have battery saving application for Windows Vista and Windows 7 Notebooks?
2 comments:
How about lowering the priority of non essential programs?
Thanks for the suggestion - I did a bit of research and came across this wikipedia article that basically says I shouldn't tamper with process priority because idle priority prevents the CPU from sleeping and consumes more power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idle_(CPU)
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