Arch Linux

tomislavski

Member

Registered: 2010-02-09

Posts: 87

[SOLVED]non existent battery life

Hi everyone,

I've bought this laptop:

http://www.notebooksbilliger.de/hp+615+ … anti+glare

because it's cheap, I'm a student and I've seen that its battery life is estimated up to 4 hours. Now, I have switched from Ubuntu to Arch because I want to learn and have more control over my system. I have installed the Archlinux over the Net, and the battery (after cycling and full charging) runs for a freaking HOUR AND TEN MINUTES. Since I don't trust my IT knowledge much, I've ran various liveCDs of various Linux distributions, and the laptop just dies after an hour and 10-15 minutes.

I have emailed the store and tried to get a reclamation on the battery and got an answer that the statement of "up to 4 hours" is just a rough estimate.

My question: can this short battery life have major dependence on the system configuration? I'm asking because right now I'm running vanilla OpenBOX installation and a few daemons, just the default tiny Archlinux install. If it runs for an hour and 10 minutes on minimal installation, I might as well toss it into the garbage bin when I start compiling on both cores.

Any advice? I'm programming a lot and I really need this thing to work for extended periods of time (at least 2.5 h)... but 1.16667 hours is really a difference from freaking 4 hours.

Thanks

Last edited by tomislavski (2010-03-20 11:12:35)

toad

Member

From: if only I knew

Registered: 2008-12-22

Posts: 1,775

Website

Re: [SOLVED]non existent battery life

Unless you are willing to work your way through large parts of the wiki and understand acpi, laptop-mode et al you may be interested to learn that there is an ubuntu based OS that is especially tweaked for battery life, low power consumption and top performance. It is called WattOS - just google it

---

never trust a toad...
::Grateful ArchDonor::
::Grateful Wikipedia Donor::

tomislavski

Member

Registered: 2010-02-09

Posts: 87

Re: [SOLVED]non existent battery life

Unless you are willing to work your way through large parts of the wiki and understand acpi, laptop-mode et al you may be interested to learn that there is an ubuntu based OS that is especially tweaked for battery life, low power consumption and top performance. It is called WattOS - just google it

Thank you very much for the advice. Yes I am very willing to learn this stuff. Can you give me some "global" pointers regarding where to start?  I'm really liking Arch and how I need to learn a bunch of stuff to get it to work properly. It's just the same in my line of work... I guess that's why I love what I do.

whompus

Member

From: Durham. UK

Registered: 2005-08-09

Posts: 256

Re: [SOLVED]non existent battery life

The best place to start is here http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop

davidgurvich

Member

Registered: 2010-02-11

Posts: 118

Re: [SOLVED]non existent battery life

If you are doing any compiling your battery life will be non-existent.  Going from 4 hours with applications like word processing to 1 hour with compiling and debugging seems about right.  Compiling may be one of the few applications worse for battery life than flash video.

tomislavski

Member

Registered: 2010-02-09

Posts: 87

Re: [SOLVED]non existent battery life

The best place to start is here http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop

Thanks! I'll do this tonight.

tomislavski

Member

Registered: 2010-02-09

Posts: 87

Re: [SOLVED]non existent battery life

If you are doing any compiling your battery life will be non-existent.  Going from 4 hours with applications like word processing to 1 hour with compiling and debugging seems about right.  Compiling may be one of the few applications worse for battery life than flash video.

Yeah... I thought so. I'll do my best to set the laptop up properly (and try to think more and compile less, which I'm already trying.. ). The Archlinux Wiki is AMAZING. Thanks to all the people who worked on it!

If you have experience in using a laptop this way, could you tell me is it worth to buy an extended battery? Like the one with 8 cels... ? Or should I buy another one and use them both when I'm working outside?