Battery Drain!

Google · 2010-06-13 15:00:04

I tested my laptop. I tested the drain for 20 minutes. I did two tests. I am unsure if my wifi toggle works (I don't use a wifi interface). I tested this mostly to see how the battery stands up, and to see if the wifi toggle makes any difference. I know my wifi works when I open wifi-radar, and I search/connect to a network, but I don't know if wireless is running and searching in the background. (I don't run wifi-radar as a daemon).

These tests were done running idle, with no activity. No ethernet attached.

Test 1: Low brightness, wifi toggle light on.
Total battery drained, 7%

Test 2: Low brightness, wifi toggle light off
Total battery drained, 7%

Obviously the wifi toggle makes no difference. I am still unsure if the wifi is scanning in the background.

Is this drain excessive? I haven't made any special changes or anything. I am running LXDE and OpenBox. On Windows my battery can last 5-ish hours. It's a 6 cell battery.

lagagnon · 2010-06-13 15:48:38

What are you using to determine drain % ? If you install "powertop" it will show you actual watts used, this is probably more accurate. If you have a hardware switch on the laptop for your wifi that will definitely turn off the wifi rx/tx and will easily save you about 1 W of power consumption. I also suggest you install "acpitool", it gives an accurate reading of battery status from the command line.

If you have not yet read these pages they might be very useful to you:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/power-management-guide.xml

Arch Linux

#1 2010-06-13 15:00:04

Battery Drain!

#2 2010-06-13 15:48:38

Re: Battery Drain!

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