Stares at computer. Blinks.
Back in January I bought a new laptop when Windows 7 reached end-of-life and my old machine proved less-than-capable at running Windows 10. I got another Thinkpad, refurbished, and had it shipped right to my brother so he could replace the hard-drive with two new solid-state drives. And it’s been great ever since, except for the battery.
Right out of the box, with no programs running, a full charge on both batteries would only give me a bit over two hours battery life. I spent a little time trying to sort this out when I first got it, but at the top I was mostly occupied with transferring data and software from my old laptop and preparing for what turned out to be my final California trip for the school year.
Anyways, for over three months I’ve been living with a mediocre battery and a fan running far harder than it had any need to. Until tonight, when I finally stumbled on the right combination of words in Google that directed me to a YouTube video explaining that for some reason the Radeon software was looking for a folder that didn’t exist because that sub-component didn’t apply to my GPU. But it kept on looking. Constantly. And like a cell-phone draining its battery looking for a signal that wasn’t there, it kept looking so hard it affected the performance of the whole laptop.
All I had to do was create a dummy folder with the name Radeon was looking for and my CPU load dropped from 40% to 4%, by battery life tripled to over six and a half hours, and it’s so much quieter now too.
I texted my brother and he replied “Damn. That is simultaneously both stupid and awesome.”
Mirrored from Frenzied Theatre.
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