Arch is roughly twice as good as XP...

Barrucadu · 2008-05-08 18:07:50

...when it comes to my laptop's battery life! It is fairly old and worn down and has a maximum capacity of 25%. In Windows it would last, literally, 10 minutes or less. I have been operating without the power cable plugged in for about 20 minutes now and it's just hit 3%.

finferflu · 2008-05-08 18:15:33

Wow, I have always heard that on Windows the battery lasts longer, in comparison with Linux (I don't know because Windows doesn't last even a boot on a new machine for me). Do you have any special configuration?

Barrucadu · 2008-05-08 18:24:36

No special configuration that I know of. I haven't consiously done anything to prolong battery life, it has just turned out like this.

Mikko777 · 2008-05-08 18:29:12

Windows was better for battery about year ago, now its about same or sometimes 15-20% in favor of linux if i remember the phoronix article correctly.

finferflu · 2008-05-08 18:37:09

So, I guess that 1,30h is the best I can expect from the battery of my brand new laptop...

lman · 2008-05-08 18:48:19

depends on the type of notebook. For me the battery lasts around 3 hours both on linux and windows. (it's a hp laptop with igp and sempron, and 6 cell bat)

Skittles · 2008-05-08 18:52:00

same here, ~ 3 hours doing normal stuff and not to fenzy things

finferflu · 2008-05-08 18:52:46

Well, my laptop is very cheap, so I guess I can't expect so much from it. here it is.

moljac024 · 2008-05-08 19:34:02

finferflu wrote:

Well, my laptop is very cheap, so I guess I can't expect so much from it. here it is.

HP laptops are beautiful... I just don't like their recent flirting with Vista

finferflu · 2008-05-08 20:24:08

Surely it is beautiful, it's very KISS, it has only the essentials, I was very lucky to get it despite the low price. However the specs are not the best you can find around, and I expect the battery to be of a lower quality too.
Vista only lasted 5 min on this machine

jbromley · 2008-05-08 21:35:20

I've seen the same improvement. If I do anything I couldn't get two hours with windows. With Arch I get 3-1/2 hours, and that's with a 17" LCD on my Dell Inspiron 9300. Of course, I'm probably running far fewer processes with Arch (wmii with my custom no-desktop setup) and I've tweaked laptop mode for my work patterns. Using the ATI powersaving helps a lot too.

Regards,
j

JGC · 2008-05-08 21:39:06

The reason arch is better than Windows for your battery is simple: linux is improving on power management these days. You'll see this improvement with any recent distribution that has a recent kernel and recent applications. Another advantage of linux is that it's you who decides when to suspend your laptop. A little while ago I was burning a CD from Windows using nero with 25 minutes battery life left. The CD would take 4 minutes to complete. Halfway, Windows decided to suspend because I had 10% battery left, giving me a useless CD. On Linux, gnome-power-manager notifies me that I have 0 minutes battery power left and that I should get a powercord to not lose any data...

thisllub · 2008-05-09 03:46:47

I haven't found a single Linux distro that ACPI doesn't cause to hang my Acer Travelmate.
Curiously FreeBSD and OpenSolaris both implement Acpi beautifully.
I have never got more than an hour out of it even with the screen turned right down.

moljac024 · 2008-05-09 08:24:11

finferflu wrote:

Surely it is beautiful, it's very KISS, it has only the essentials, I was very lucky to get it despite the low price. However the specs are not the best you can find around, and I expect the battery to be of a lower quality too.
Vista only lasted 5 min on this machine

Totally off-topic, but my 15.4" MSI vr600 laptop has a full keyboard with the numeric keypad.....don't know why more laptops don't do this - is having a numeric keypad not KISS ?

Last edited by moljac024 (2008-05-09 08:24:50)

iphitus · 2008-05-09 09:13:31

thisllub wrote:

I haven't found a single Linux distro that ACPI doesn't cause to hang my Acer Travelmate.
Curiously FreeBSD and OpenSolaris both implement Acpi beautifully.
I have never got more than an hour out of it even with the screen turned right down.

So file a bug and get it fixed rather than wasting time trying multiple distros?

finferflu · 2008-05-09 10:42:36

moljac024 wrote:

Totally off-topic, but my 15.4" MSI vr600 laptop has a full keyboard with the numeric keypad.....don't know why more laptops don't do this - is having a numeric keypad not KISS ?

Technically, no, but it's damn comfortable

yahya · 2008-05-17 09:46:59

mmm, i have a fujitsu siemens lifebook E8410, about 2:30 on M$ winBLOWS, about 4:30 on Arch Linux
(that would be by setting CPUfreq to ondemand and disabling non-neccessary daemons and reducing brightness in both blows and arch)

Ink-Jet · 2008-05-17 11:30:28

To be honest, I really wouldn't miss my numberpad, I rarely ever use it.

Barrucadu · 2008-05-17 14:26:42

I never use the numpad. I find it faster to use the, err, what would it be called... "numrow"?

moljac024 · 2008-05-17 18:05:54

The funny thing is that I don't use the numpad either!

simon04 · 2008-05-18 20:40:42

Moved from Ubuntu 7.10 to Arch Linux. Battery life of my IBM Thinkpad X31 increased from 1:00 to 1:45. Great!

thisllub · 2008-05-19 05:18:34

iphitus wrote:

thisllub wrote:
I haven't found a single Linux distro that ACPI doesn't cause to hang my Acer Travelmate.
Curiously FreeBSD and OpenSolaris both implement Acpi beautifully.
I have never got more than an hour out of it even with the screen turned right down.
So file a bug and get it fixed rather than wasting time trying multiple distros?

With ACER?

I just run with ACPI=off.

I use it when I travel, not whilst travelling so I don't really care.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-05-08 18:07:50

Arch is roughly twice as good as XP...

#2 2008-05-08 18:15:33

Re: Arch is roughly twice as good as XP...

#3 2008-05-08 18:24:36

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#5 2008-05-08 18:37:09

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#6 2008-05-08 18:48:19

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