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Battery life, fan control, and light web browsing

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RehabMan

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Joined
May 2, 2012
Messages
181,111
Motherboard
Intel DH67BL
CPU
i7-2600K
Graphics
HD 3000
Mac
  1. MacBook Air
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
I thought I'd share a little tip I just discovered. First of all, I use Chrome for web browsing. I'm sure the same issue is applicable to other browsers.

For the longest time, I've been running Chrome with AdBlock, and I didn't have tonymacx86.com whitelisted... so it was all along blocking ads. I do try to whitelist sites that I want to support, so I recently enabled ads on tonymac86.com... And then I noticed that my fan was running more... At that point, I took a quick look at Activity Monitor and discovered Shockwave Flash using a bunch of CPU. So, I disabled ads again, tested, and everything was back good. But I want to allow tonymacx86.com to serve up ads...

So, I did a little digging into Chrome's settings and discovered that I could disable Shockwave flash and make it run only on click (Settings, Advanced, Content Settings, PlugIns) and this has disabled all the animation and thus saved CPU time/heat and battery life...
 
Flash can be a batch for CPUs, that's for sure. Thank god* for html5 stuff superseding flash.

* I mean Nic Cage

Advertisers will find a way to ruin the web with HTML5. You can be sure of that...
 
I am using "click to flash" Safari extension, it's a pretty cool one. Take a look at it https://extensions.apple.com

From the Apple website:

ClickToFlash.
ClickToFlash prevents the Flash plug-in from running. It replaces any Flash element on a webpage with a placeholder; simply click the placeholder to load the Flash content. ClickToFlash also lets you replace Flash videos from select websites (such as YouTube) with H.264 video. Other optional features include advanced whitelisting.
 

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I've been a big fan of Chrome, but I just recently started using Safari. It's not just faster, but the fan spins up much less frequently. I disabled flash in both browsers.
 
I thought I'd share a little tip I just discovered. First of all, I use Chrome for web browsing. I'm sure the same issue is applicable to other browsers.

For the longest time, I've been running Chrome with AdBlock, and I didn't have tonymacx86.com whitelisted... so it was all along blocking ads. I do try to whitelist sites that I want to support, so I recently enabled ads on tonymac86.com... And then I noticed that my fan was running more... At that point, I took a quick look at Activity Monitor and discovered Shockwave Flash using a bunch of CPU. So, I disabled ads again, tested, and everything was back good. But I want to allow tonymacx86.com to serve up ads...

So, I did a little digging into Chrome's settings and discovered that I could disable Shockwave flash and make it run only on click (Settings, Advanced, Content Settings, PlugIns) and this has disabled all the animation and thus saved CPU time/heat and battery life...

i've noticed adblock on osx w7/w8 under chrome/chromium/firefox etc makes my probook i3 fan noise go up and it was annoying. i tested out ghostery and disconnect and found they did more or less similar job to adblock, less cpu demand=less heat=less fan noise level=preserved battery life.

maybe developers who make ad block type plugins/apps would need to optimize the size of the database blocklist? sort of like comparing the the av/fw for windows such as lean mean nod32 vs some clunky slow space hungry huge elephant in the room.




I average about 3.5-6 hours battery life for light browsing and with open text doc /word/pages/textedit. if some general HD 1080p youtube videos 30 to 60 mins playback it would put it to around 3.5 to 4 hours battery life.
 
i've noticed adblock on osx w7/w8 under chrome/chromium/firefox etc makes my probook i3 fan noise go up and it was annoying. i tested out ghostery and disconnect and found they did more or less similar job to adblock, less cpu demand=less heat=less fan noise level=preserved battery life.

Thanks for the information. Very helpful.
 
I just finished setting up my Raspberry PI as an ad blocking server (lighttpd + dnsmasq + yoyo list). Everything is done at server side. No more AdBlock. No more CPU usage. Cool. :thumbup:
 
I know it's off topic, but I hope it help others.

1. Install lighttpd and dnsmasq in Terminal:

Code:
# sudo apt-get install lighttpd
# sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

2. Download the ads list.
3. Edit /etc/dnsmasq.conf and add the ads list :

Code:
conf-file=/etc/dnsmasq.adblock.conf

dnsmasq.adblock.conf is the file downloaded at step2.

4. Now set your iPad or your Mac to use the Raspberry Pi as DNS server. Set your secondary DNS to ISP.

I didn't notice any delay while using dnsmasq as primary DNS server.
 
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