I have two powerbooks. One is a 1400c ( OS 8.5.1) and one is a 3400c (OS 8.6). When I'm running off the battery on the 1400 the speedometer (battery consumption) control strip) is pegged in the red during intensive use. When I'm running off the battery on the 3400 the speedometer barely reaches the midpoint during hard use (which I assume means it's using less energy for the same operation.) Why is this? What does it mean?
Denny
Denny, the speedometer is a very rough measure of how much power your PowerBook is currently consuming. The "redder" the more juice it's sucking out of your battery.
Typically, having something like Internet Explorer running while on battery can cause my speedometer to be pegged. IE uses a fair amount of CPU time and writes data to disk. Both of those activities require power.
You can alter how your computer performs while running on battery power by changing some settings in your Energy Saver control panel. Generally, the more responsive and better performing your computer is, the more battery power you'll draw. If you decrease your performance (by enabling things like processor cycling, reducing the processor speed, and letting your hard disk go to sleep quickly), decrease your screen brightness, etc, you'll get longer battery run times.
Some people take these things to extremes (like me) and "trick out" their systems to be power-conservative. Read the archives for messages about things like booting from compact flash cards or RAM disks...
Also, OS 8.6 should have some power conservation improvements over OS 8.5.x. On older Macs with dying batteries, usually the difference should be negligible, but who knows...
Oh yeah, Virtual Memory is a battery killer. Turn it off and enjoy longer battery run times. If you can't live without it, you can mitigate some of it's problems by pointing it to a flash card (CF, ATA, whatever) as the VM volume.
Peace, Drew
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