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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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