Arch Linux

samrat94

Member

Registered: 2011-01-07

Posts: 29

Lenovo E520- did a lot of things but battery life is still terrible

I'm using a Thinkpad E520 with XFCE. I get around five hours of battery life on Windows but only around 2 hours on Arch(or Ubuntu, for that matter). Here's what I've done till now:

* Blacklisted `radeon` (it's hybrid graphics)
* installed the AUR package mentioned here- https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=134109
* installed laptop-mode-tools, cpufreq.
* also, configured the boot config. to add `pcie_aspm = force`
* disabled Bluetooth and trackpad(since, I don't use these very much)

But, powertop still shows my power consumption at around 23W. What else can I do to improve my situation?

ichfarbstift

Member

Registered: 2011-11-22

Posts: 14

Re: Lenovo E520- did a lot of things but battery life is still terrible

Hi,
first thing that I noticed, and that worked on my laptop.
In order to turn off completely the discrete card, you have to modprobe the radeon module, and explicitly turn off the radeon card.
I have these two lines in my rc.local:

modprobe radeon
echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

I am pretty sure that this will help.
You can check the reason why here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hybrid_graphics

samrat94

Member

Registered: 2011-01-07

Posts: 29

Re: Lenovo E520- did a lot of things but battery life is still terrible

Hi, actually I had already added those two lines to rc.local.