I have a Thinkpad T440P. At idle, the power consumption is about 13 watts. I already made the UI and wallpaper dark, but I want to reduce power consumption some more. Is there a way to reduce the refresh rate past the minimum listed in the display app? The minimum is showing up for me as 60hz. Any other random tips for reducing baseline battery usage would be appreciated.
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This won’t help at all unless you’re using a CRT display (I guess not) or an OLED (I also guess that’s not the case). On other display technologies, the backlight is always on, and the pixels just hide it (like closed window blinds). You’re using the same amount of energy, just converting it to heat instead of light.
The display refresh rate is also not going to make a huge difference.
Your main thing to do is to reduce the screen brightness using the slider in screen preferences, if your hardware is supported. And set the power management mode to “power saving” in ProcessController settings (right click the CPU usage meter in DeskBar). Also set up the screensaver settings to turn off the display when not in use.
Even with all that, Haiku is missing a lot of things for low power usage compared to other operating systems.
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