VMware Workstation Battery Drain

Hello,

I use my supposedly netbook every day and the use is very mobile. It should have 7 up to 9 hours of battery life in normal use, but I am running Windows 7 and Ubuntu in the background with VMware Workstation. This is great for running apps older or for linux on my Windows 8 PC because I tried dual-booting and it didn't work, especially not for having to work efficiently. Now the battery can run 4 hours if you're lucky with these processes running. Is there anything to use Windows 8 and Windows 7 at the same time and get the battery life that is possible with this netbook while browsing the web and working normally?

Thanks a lot for the possible help.

Best regards,

Florian Kleinhoven

web life drain working battery linux apps workstation windows7 background ubuntu windows8 vmware canonical

asked Feb 21 at 15:40

gnomieflorian
31●18●27●34

2 Answers:

oldest newest most voted

There isnt much you can do except disable all the aesthetics of win 7/8. Running 2 OS at the same time takes some power it it's normal that it will drain battery quicker. There isn't much at all you can do

answered Feb 21 at 16:40

Kal
936●2●8●17

Thank you for the answer! But at school this doesn't work because they think it is not needed to charge halfway through the day. But whatever.

(Feb 22 at 03:56) gnomieflorian

You could set the virtual machine in hibernate mode when you don't need it. Then power it up again. Also make sure you have a lot of ram, so the vm can stay in memory. You could try and fiddle with the power management settings in windows (on the main os). Setting the cpu to max at 80% on load instead of 100%, could and I say could, save you some time.

But like Kal said, running 2 OS at the same time, requires more cpu, ram, hdd power and thus less battery time.

answered Feb 22 at 04:51

Cobz666
16●2

Hello. Thanks for the thinking again. I have an i5 and 6 GIGs of RAM and a 3rd gen Samsung HDD, not a SSD but funny is that the OS's run better on 2 Gigs of allocated Ram than on 4 Gigs because I was tweaking this for gaming purposed and to find out if a bigger buffer would help with the battery. I tried installing Samsung eco mode in the VM but that didn't work.

(Feb 22 at 08:56) gnomieflorian

That is normal. Since you have 6GB of ram, reserve 4GB of it for the VM, leaves only 2GB for the host. The reason it is slowing down, is because the system is paging. Swapping thing out of memory and putting it on the HDD. Since the HDD is much slower then memory, this leads to lagging and slower performance. If possible, put 8GB of ram in your machine.

(Feb 22 at 09:03) Cobz666

Hello again. I think I understand what you are saying. The HDD is indeed much slower then the Ram and Processor so I think I can go to the computer store here in town and get me two more GIGs to put in there. It is as easy as sliding a SD card in with this notebook.

(Feb 22 at 09:52) gnomieflorian

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Asked: Feb 21 at 15:40

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Last updated: Feb 22 at 09:52

VMware Workstation Battery Drain

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