VW Laptops and Batteries.

[Donald Wardlaw]

My work as an architect has me measuring existing buildings for every project. Some are small average houses, some are large commercial/industrial buildings. Today's building tipped the scales at 850,000 s.f., for which I had only to measure some detailed areas.

A concern is the availability of power so that I'm not completely reliant on the limited charge of the battery. Some of these measures take a lot of time and there are no outlets.

I'm finding the available charge* running vectorworks is 4.5-5 hours, which is for me marginal. I have a set of moves to make the best of things. I turn off wifi and quit all application except VW and Accountedge (time tracking). Sometimes I turn down the screen illumination. MacOS has power saving options and I use those. I also have an external battery (Chargetech) that provides an AC outlet. I'm still sizing it up, but it appears it will be good for an additional 1.5-2 hours, which is getting me close to a good day's work.

What strikes me, though, is that the battery life from the combination of this laptop (battery reports good condition) and VW16 doesn't seem to be what it used to be with an older laptop, an earlier version, and an older OS. It feels like I've got 1.5-2 hours less run time with this set up.

So, finally, I have a question: Is power consumption something that can be influenced by application software design, and if yes, does the VW team consider it a priority, and if yes, is there more that can be done?

Thanks,

Donald

*mid 2015 mbp, 2.5 i7, 16g ram, graphics chip upgrade. El Capitan. Wacom usb.

[AlanW]

Why not use an external battery.

http://lifehacker.com/five-best-external-battery-packs-509802431

[Donald Wardlaw]

I am doing that too. The Chargetech is an external battery. The batteries in the linked article to not work, it appears, with the mag safe connectors on the MBP. The Chargetech device provides usb for phones and tablets and AC for a regular MBP charger.

My question though, is really about what if anything can be done on the vector works side of the equation, whether there is room for improvement there.

[PVA - Admin]

Vectorworks now uses more of your available hardware, so the power draw will be more significant. No effort is made to reduce battery usage in development.

Other than switching to the integrated graphics card on your MBP (If it has dual graphics) the only way to reduce power usage in Vectorworks would be to avoid rendering and heavy geometry calculation.

[rDesign]

So, finally, I have a question: Is power consumption something that can be influenced by application software design, and if yes, does the VW team consider it a priority, and if yes, is there more that can be done?

This is probably not the power consumption issue at hand but I know for a fact that Vw2016 will prevent your Mac OS X computer from going to sleep. (It's been reported as a bug by myself and others -it still happens in SP4). So if you thought your Mac was sleeping on battery while Vw was open, that would definitely kill your battery.

Just remember to quit Vw on battery power if you're not using it.

So in my example, the software design can most certainly affect power consumption.

[Donald Wardlaw]

Hmmm.

Jim, thanks for proper answer. If I read between the lines, VW does use more resources than it used to, maybe multi-threads, multi-cores.

That makes me wonder if I should try doing field work with one of the older versions, to see whether that gets valuable battery life improvements.

If I'm using El Capitan, what is the oldest version I might use for basic 2d documentation?

Thanks,

Donald

[PVA - Admin]

2015 SP5 I believe.

[mike-h]

Interesting that "No effort is made to reduce battery usage in development." - why not I wonder? I understand there may (frequently) be times when extra power draw gives better performance, but why not set the brief to reduce battery usage where possible? Many of us work on laptops, external batteries are cumbersome if working on the go.

Does purging resources etc. to reduce filesize impact on energy use at all?

We certainly also notice that our Macbook pro seems to work overtime to keep cooling all that energy use so the laptop itself is much warmer working VW than any other programme.

 

[PVA - Admin]

3 hours ago, mike-h said:

Interesting that "No effort is made to reduce battery usage in development." - why not I wonder? I understand there may (frequently) be times when extra power draw gives better performance, but why not set the brief to reduce battery usage where possible? Many of us work on laptops, external batteries are cumbersome if working on the go.

Does purging resources etc. to reduce filesize impact on energy use at all?

We certainly also notice that our Macbook pro seems to work overtime to keep cooling all that energy use so the laptop itself is much warmer working VW than any other programme.

Mainly because our current focuses are on speed and stability, with efficiency falling into third place. Efficiency will come naturally once we finish modernizing things, currently the main battery killer tends to be our need to completely use a single core at its max clock, which generates enough heat to rival multiple cores under a partial load.