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#1 2025-09-25 14:43:55

pcnobjrbse
Member
Registered: 2025-09-25
Posts: 1

StarLite mk IV very high power draw and short battery life

I recently purchased an [allegedly] like-new StarLite mk IV netbook on eBay as an upgrade from the Acer c720 I was using as my daily driver. I installed Arch on the mkIV to mirror my configuration on the Acer, with the only difference being that I enabled 'swap on zram' while running `archinstall`.

Immediately I noticed that the battery loses charge very quickly, as in I'm lucky to get 2 hours of battery life doing normal tasks. I installed powertop to investigate what is going wrong, and here is sample output:

The battery reports a discharge rate of 27.9 W
The energy consumed was 567 J
The estimated remaining time is 0 hours, 49 minutes

Summary: 786.7 wakeups/second,  0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 10.4% CPU use

Power est.              Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
  12.7 W     20.8%                      Device         Display backlight
  6.52 W      2.0 pkts/s                Device         Network interface: wlan0 (iwlwifi)
  3.00 W    100.0%                      Device         Radio device: btusb

This is while the battery is reporting 71% capacity and is rapidly draining. When I check powertop, the discharge rate usually ranges from 25 W to 60 W. It will randomly get as low as 5 W, but I am unclear when and why it decides to do that. Usually it's on the higher side.

I also installed cpupower to attempt to change the frequency governor and high/low limits, and here's the output from `cpupower frequency-info`:

analyzing CPU 2:
  driver: intel_cpufreq
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 2
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 2
  maximum transition latency: 20.0 us
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 3.10 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: conservative ondemand userspace powersave performance schedutil
  current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 2.00 GHz.
                  The governor "conservative" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency: 995 MHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes

This doesn't strike me as a heavy load so I'm confused why powertop shows such a high discharge rate.

The last issue is that the reported remaining battery capacity is sometimes wrong. For instance, last night it reported having ~30% battery left and then abruptly powered off.

I'm curious if this is a known issue with the StarLite mkIV, a battery issue, a software issue, or something worse.

Let me know if you need more logs and how to produce them.

Last edited by pcnobjrbse (2025-09-25 14:44:56)

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