This paper introduces a new adaptive minimum-estimation minimum-combining switched-combining based scheme that reduces considerably the average receiver channel estimation complexity and the power drain from the battery while satisfying the desired performance requirement. More specifically, analysis supported by numerical results show that the newly proposed combining scheme can achieve essentially the same performance as competing schemes such as generalized selection combining (GSC) and minimum selection GSC while offering 50% channel estimation and 75% processing power savings for some system parameters of interest