Arch Linux

ariel

Member

Registered: 2009-03-30

Posts: 25

short battery life

hello

I have arch with gnome on my Toshiba laptop and i have very short battery life.
it ends after about 40min.
it seems to be problem in the system because when i open the computer it told me it have about 2hours and i put it on friend's laptop with vista and it told me i have 92% and 1:10hours left so i think there is(are) any or some process(es) that waste power and so short the battery life.

how can i manage the power consumption and by that to maximize battery life?

10x anyway
ariel

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,791

Re: short battery life

For starters, dim your display backlight.  Set the system up to make it happen automatically.  Have the shut the backlight off after more than a few minutes of inactivity.

Throttle your processor(s).  Set up cpufreq and configure it to use an aggressive governor while operating on batteries.  On laptops, you should also enable a governor such as "On demand" to help keep the system cool even when running on AC.

Don't do things that draw power.  Try not to use the optical drive.  If you want to watch movies, rip them to the hard disk while on AC, watch them from disk while on batteries, and delete them when you are done.

Look into the power management of your hard drive.  You might look at allowing it to spin down when inactive, but I find this to not work real well under Linux.  They tend to spin up and down a lot, negating the power savings.

See if you can shut things down.  Wireless transmitters use a fair amount of power.  So do the receivers while they are doing correlation (trying to synchronize to the chipping a spread spectrum channel).  If you are not using wireless, shut it off.  Look into whether your laptop can shut off other systems it is not using.

Minimize USB devices.  They draw power from the system -- especially ipods and cellphones which charge their batteries from their host.

Laptop manufacturers spend a great amount of effort customizing certain operating systems from the American Pacific Northwest to maximize the battery performance of their systems.  It can be expected that Linux require a little effort to optimize for power management as well.

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MadTux

Member

Registered: 2009-09-20

Posts: 553

Re: short battery life

You could use laptop mode tools:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop

These set of scripts provide extensible configuration options.