robhimself said:
In system preferences under the energy saver option, you can go to "options" and set your processor performance to Automatic, Highest, or Reduced.
Will setting it to "Highest," have an effect on the life of your processor? And if not, does it have any other reprocussions?
When you consider your battery life of a laptop, which I am going to assume right now you have, there are means in which one person can can conserve the battery life, but at a cost, lower processing capabilities. What is happening when you select "reduced" is that the processor is requiring less energy, and so it does the same things, only at a slower rate. Putting it on high will mean that the processor will work at its same potential has if it were plugged into the outlet, however, the processor now requires more energy, and therefore your battery will lose its charge at a much quicker rate.
As far as the question at hands go, I myself have been running my iBook G4 on highest performance when I run it on the battery, because I typically want to get the work that I want to get accomplished long before the battery dies. I have not noticed anything out of the ordinary from turning the performance up higher. Well, maybe the only I could attribute would be a little extra heat, but that is only a minute problem for me (I run a laptop cooler). Other than tht, you have pretty free reign on the processor performance.