Laptop Battery Life Again

[Bill Davidsen]

Paulo Cavalcanti wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 1:23 AM, jdow <jdow at earthlink.net 
> <mailto:jdow at earthlink.net>> wrote:
> 
>     From: "Paulo Cavalcanti" <promac at gmail.com <mailto:promac at gmail.com>>
>     Sent: Saturday, 2008, July 05 12:40
> 
> 
> 
>         Hi,
> 
>         I noticed that when I boot on kernel 2.6.25,
>         my laptop battery, according to gnome, has 3h:40 min of
>         charge. However, when booting on a 2.6.24 kernel,
>         this number goes up to 4h:20 min.
> 
>         Then, I collected some interesting links, discussing this issue.
> 
>         1) http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue100
> 
>         2) http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumption
> 
>         3) http://kdekorte.blogspot.com/
> 
>         4) http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/faq
> 
>         5) http://lwn.net/Articles/257426/
> 
>         My questions are:
> 
>         1) should I follow powertop advices blindly?
> 
>         2) On the first link, in the topic
>         Reducing Power Usage Of Fedora
>         https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-August/msg00558.html
> 
>         Raul Sundaram recommends using
> 
>         echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
> 
>         Why this is not done automatically?
> 
>         3) In the third link, there is an acpi script that really works,
>         and can be used to change the parameters, when switching from
>         battery to power chord (although some options are wrong,
>         specially the hdparm use - be careful).
> 
>         4) What about laptop-mode-tools available from Dries' repo?
> 
>         5) Why different kernels have different expectations, regarding
>         battery
>         discharge?
> 
>         I would like to hear some advice, because I have not owned
>         a laptop for some time, and I do not want to burst my HD
>         or shorten my battery life.
> 
I have queued reading those links, but while it's fresh in my mind, do 
power down your USB interfaces if you don't use them! Recent kernels and 
drivers are less critical about this, but you can still add 5-15 min 
battery life doing this (depends on chipset, and maybe phase of the moon).

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot