Arch Linux

petch

Member

Registered: 2014-10-20

Posts: 1

4hr30 battery life to 2hr30 after following power saving wiki

So I thought I might be able to squeeze a little more time out of my laptop. What an awful mistake :-(

I followed
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ma … management
Which led me to
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Powerdown
and
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management
and apparently this is "considered by many to be the de facto utility for power saving"
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop_Mode_Tools

I installed powerdown-git, laptop-mode-tools, and edited /etc/modprobe.d/audio_powersave.conf, /etc/sysctl.d/laptop.conf and /etc/udev/rules.d/70-wifi-powersave.rules

And my battery life dropped by over 2 hours after editing . After reverting the changes and rebooting, my battery life is now at 3 hours from full charge. I've still lost 90~105 minutes after removing everything. Not sure what to do now other than a reinstall, which I would really rather not do.

No, my brightness setting isn't any different from before. It's been the same throughout and, a little off-topic, I've never been able to change it. I press the brightness buttons, the brightness bar goes up/down, but there's no difference. I tried pommed-light (a recommended by the wonderful wiki) and that failed to do anything, including swapping the fn key functions. So, if anyone can shed some light onto getting pommed-light to actually work or enabling the screen brightness buttons on a MacBookPro10,1 that would be fantastic.

Edit: Also, noticing a long time between entering login details in cinnamon and getting into the desktop. It used to blackscreen for about a second, now it takes about 5s, which is longer than booting takes.

Last edited by petch (2014-10-21 00:49:03)

eriks

Member

Registered: 2013-06-11

Posts: 37

Re: 4hr30 battery life to 2hr30 after following power saving wiki

Hi petch, without having looked into the details of your problem, I switched to tlp based powermanagement (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/TLP) some time ago on a ThinkPad X230 and don't have any obvious problem since then.

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: 4hr30 battery life to 2hr30 after following power saving wiki

reverting the changes

Did you *uninstall* the programs you'd installed? Did you check what automatic setup they perform as part of the installation process, e.g. Arch's ".install" files?

Hard drives are fickle about which power-saving modes they support, so that's something to check, especially since you indicate a slowdown.

drcouzelis

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

Website

Re: 4hr30 battery life to 2hr30 after following power saving wiki

Are you certain it was your power saving configurations that reduced the battery life? Did you make any other changes to your installation during this procedure? Such as doing a system update?

If so, try downgrading those packages. Is the battery life back to what you expected?

SuperBo

Member

Registered: 2012-02-20

Posts: 45

Re: 4hr30 battery life to 2hr30 after following power saving wiki

I think you should use only one program. Powerdown or Laptop Mode tools, not both.