Maximizing Your Laptop Performance & Dell Laptop Battery Tips

Aug. 14, 2010 - PRLog -- Maximizing Your Laptop Performance & Dell Laptop Battery Tips

This guide lists some tips and tricks that you can use with the Dell XPS, Inspiron, Latitude and Studio line of products such as M1210, M1330, M1410, M1530, M1730, and M2010 models notebook to give you a richer experience.

Many of these tips can also be applied to other laptop brands such as HP, Lenovo, IBM, Acer, LG, Sony, etc.


Dell D830 Laptop Battery
http://www.aussie-battery.com/batteries.php/Dell+Latitude%20D830+Laptop-Battery
Li-ion, 4400 mAh, 11.1 V
Price:AU $ 84.30

A few things that surprised me

It is Heavy and Thick (with a 9 cell laptop battery and the Geforce Go 7400, the weight comes to 2.4kg)
The built-in speakers suck.
The screen is too bright even at the lowest level (when all the lights are off)
MediaDirect is actually a variation of Windows XP. It does not save any power. I expected it to be a one-button touch to play media. Well, it is, but not the battery power saver kind I expected.
There are no protective covers for the once-in-a-while used VGA port.
The Media Buttons are not exactly easy to press, but then, it could be because they were meant to be like that
The Webcam (camera) sucks power even if you are not using it. Dell Support says that this is by design. You will notice that it gets noticeably warm even though its not used. BIG waste of battery.
The laptop gets hot and fans spin even under light usage (just surfing web). No amount of meddling with the clock speed could stop the fans from spinning up every once and then.

Tips to Maximize your Dell Laptop Portable's Performance
All downloads mentioned are free!

Monitor temperatures and Control Fan Speeds (For Dell laptops)



Download I8kfanGUI. You can view all temperatures, including CPU, RAM, chipset, hard disk and even the fan speed. Heck, you can also increase/decrease the fan speed and set it blasting away at full speed!
Speed up loading times



Defrag your hard disk regularly. Disable unnecessary services (run > services.msc), items in Startup folder and items set to auto run (run > msconfig) on Windows startup.
Force the CPU to work slower if you don't need the power



Use SpeedSwitchXp to force the CPU to a lower speed to conserve power, or force to high speed for highest performance. It can even automatically switch depending on whether battery or direct AC is being used!

Use the latest BIOS version available

As of this writing, the latest for XPS M1210 is A08 (or A07 if it causes problems) for M1210. REMEMBER TO USE AC POWER with BATTERY as any hiccups during the flashing process can render your laptop unbootable!
Enable Performance Mode in BIOS

Go to BIOS Setup, Performance, enable Performance mode for HDD Acoustics. Note that this will cause the HDD to be noisier, so you will need to decide if performance or noise is more important to you.

Face the Reality (For Dell XPS M1210 laptops)

for details here:

http://www.aussie-battery.com/how-to-maximize-your-Dell-l...

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