As we all know, the Pandora has great battery life. But even if it's great already, there's always ways to improve it even more. There is no such thing as "too much battery life".
In this other thread there's a breakdown of Pandora's power consumption in broad categories. It's probably a good idea to check that thread first.
This thread can be used to share some tips & tricks to improve the battery life of your Pandora.
Here are my tips:
- Set the backlight brightness as low as possible. Use a brighter gamma setting than default: I use the simple gamma setting and put it at 150%. The gamma setting does not affect battery life, but the backlight has a big effect on it, so you want to get your brightness from the gamma setting, not from the backlight. Of course too high gamma will make the contrast too high, so don't overdo it.
- Disable the power indicator led. It is kind of useless (I never power off, so I know it's on, no need for a led to tell me that), and it consumes about 17mW, which is not much, but in lid-closed mode, that is the difference between 143 hours and 170 hours of standby time.
- Don't overclock higher than needed - if everything you need works fine at 500 MHz, don't run your cpu at 900 MHz all the time. The extra clock speed does have a (small) impact on power consumption.
- Don't overvolt higher than needed - if OPP2 is enough, don't set it to OPP5.
- Make sure you don't keep using the cpu unnecessarily when the lid is closed. E.g. if you were playing music, stop playback (or quit the player), don't just set the volume wheel to zero.
- Tiny effect, but still: use the stylus, not the nubs.
In this other thread there's a breakdown of Pandora's power consumption in broad categories. It's probably a good idea to check that thread first.
This thread can be used to share some tips & tricks to improve the battery life of your Pandora.
Here are my tips:
- Set the backlight brightness as low as possible. Use a brighter gamma setting than default: I use the simple gamma setting and put it at 150%. The gamma setting does not affect battery life, but the backlight has a big effect on it, so you want to get your brightness from the gamma setting, not from the backlight. Of course too high gamma will make the contrast too high, so don't overdo it.
- Disable the power indicator led. It is kind of useless (I never power off, so I know it's on, no need for a led to tell me that), and it consumes about 17mW, which is not much, but in lid-closed mode, that is the difference between 143 hours and 170 hours of standby time.
- Don't overclock higher than needed - if everything you need works fine at 500 MHz, don't run your cpu at 900 MHz all the time. The extra clock speed does have a (small) impact on power consumption.
- Don't overvolt higher than needed - if OPP2 is enough, don't set it to OPP5.
- Make sure you don't keep using the cpu unnecessarily when the lid is closed. E.g. if you were playing music, stop playback (or quit the player), don't just set the volume wheel to zero.
- Tiny effect, but still: use the stylus, not the nubs.
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