Improving Battery Life?

zak89 · 2009-03-05 21:34:22

I just got a note from a friend that Windows XP gets six and a half hours out of his MSI Wind netbook, three hours more than any linux. I also have an MSI Wind, and I checked my XP install; sure enough, it estimates five and a half hours of battery life (with wifi/bluetooth off, and screen dimmed). On openSUSE (with the same settings), I get an estimated four to four and a half hours. I've been wanting to put Archlinux on it anyways, but I was wondering if you guys knew any Arch specific tips or tricks for getting better battery life?

aglarond · 2009-03-05 21:49:03

I can't think of anything Arch-specific. I can recommend powertop, though, which is in the community repo. Just run it as root and it'll tell you what's sucking the most power. My wireless card tends to be the number one culprit. Unloading ipw2100 gives me almost a full extra hour of battery life. You can also dim the screen, disable HAL, etc. Powertop should give you some ideas.

My experience in general, though, is that XP gets better battery life than Linux. Linux tends to be designed more for sucking every last ounce of power out of a piece of hardware, which is good for performance, but bad for batteries. It's a whole lot better than it used to be, though.

-mS

CursedMonkey · 2009-03-05 22:32:38

For my laptop, I use laptop-mode-tools. It needs acpid to be installed and after you configure all the settings it will adjust your hardware to conserve power when you switch to the battery.

There's also the ArchWiki page for laptops: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop, which has some additional information.

Also, if you're using Gnome, the gnome-power-manager observes the charging and discharging rates and uses the data to predict the time remaining. In order for it to work correctly,it has to observe your laptop on battery as you would normally use it for about two full discharges, so that it has enough data for a more accurate prediction.

Last edited by CursedMonkey (2009-03-05 22:33:08)

proxima_centauri · 2009-03-05 23:08:18

Scale your CPU frequency

initbox · 2009-03-05 23:13:35

powertop, cpu scaling, rmmod all your lan/wlan/bluetooth/whatever interfaces when you don't need them. And setup laptop-mode.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-03-05 21:34:22

Improving Battery Life?

#2 2009-03-05 21:49:03

Re: Improving Battery Life?

#3 2009-03-05 22:32:38

Re: Improving Battery Life?

#4 2009-03-05 23:08:18

Re: Improving Battery Life?

#5 2009-03-05 23:13:35

Re: Improving Battery Life?

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