Laptop, standby killing NIC

binarysoul

I'm extremely mobile with my laptop and depend on the battery, so I set it to retain maximum power. The problem is that when it goes to standby, it kills my NIC connection requiring me to relogin to so many systems. It's a Dell 600.

How can I retain connectivity when battery is set to retain maximum power?

astorrs

Your computer is going into S3 standby mode which kills power to everything but the memory and the NIC (but it's just looking for WOL traffic). S1 standby mode won't really help you with your power saving problem as it will consume nearly as much as a laptop with the screen closed, SpeedStep enabled and the HDD's powered down.

The best suggestion I can offer is (assuming you have a corporate class laptop and not a home use laptop) to buy an extended battery. I use the HP 12-Cell Ultra Capacity Battery and get over 12 hours of battery life, couple that with standby mode (manually initiated) when I'm moving from one location to another and I can stretch it to last the entire day. It adds a fair amount of weight/size, but sure beats having to carry the AC adapter and find a plug wherever you are just to get more than 4 hours of work done

The only catch of course is you'll have to have a compatible laptop.

dynamik

You can also use multiple batteries. I know many people who have two or three.

darkerosxx

Go into the NIC's device properties and click on the power management tab. Under this tab is a checkbox to allow the computer to turn off the NIC to save power.