Upgrade Logic Board to newer low power board

Sadly, there is no low power logic board which you can fit into your old case.

Over the course of the time Intel and others have worked hard on lowering the power needs for different components. Apple has also worked hard improving the batteries used in its systems. All of this work is seen in the MacBook Pro retina series. It is not transferable to your older MacBook Pro.

Things you can do to gain a few minutes here and there:

• Use lower power RAM and use less of it. I would drop down to 4 GB.

• Next, I would lessen the size of the SSD (128 GB) and make sure it was a low power unit again the density of the SSD will use more power.
• Next, I would replace your battery with a newer unit. While you can find some batteries with a larger Ah the age of the battery is more important here.
• Next, I would focus on what is running using Activity Monitor. Lessen the background tasks and not run more than one application at a time.

OK, what will this buy you? Not much! If you really work hard you maybe able to get 5 minutes more of up time.

Frankly, I don't think its worth all of the trouble and besides, your system may not be very useful being stripped down to such a state.

What we do is use external battery packs to lengthen the use time. Our field engineers are often located at sites that just don't have power available or can stand still long enough to let there systems charge. We have over 250 people in the field all with older 15" MacBook Pro's.