[TriLUG] Laptop Linux

Jon Carnes jonc at nc.rr.com
Sat Dec 13 09:56:22 EST 2003


On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 19:50, Phillip Rhodes wrote:
> > 
> > Anybody have measurements on how long a battery charge lasts using Linux on a 
> > laptop?
> > 
> > What I conclude from reading this is that Linux control of ACPI ... well ... 
> > er ... sucks right now.  I'll continue to research this, but if anyone has 
> > information to the contrary I'd like to see it.
> > 
> 
> Mike,
> 
> I don't have any data for you at the moment, but if it's really 
> important to ya, I could generate some. I've got my laptop configured
> to dual-boot RH 9 and Win2K Server, so I could easily do a comparison
> and chart out the battery life times...  As it happens, I can't really 
> speak to the battery life under Linux, as I'm usually near an AC source,
> and have never let my battery run all the way down...
> 
> TTYL,
> 
> Phil

I have an interesting story that is along those lines.  I bought some
old Laptops for $25/each (old Toshiba P233's) and to test/retrain the
batteries I charged them up and then ran them out a few times using the
current OS, Win98.
I thought the batteries were in fairly bad shape as they wouldn't hold a
charge for longer than about a half hour.

I installed Mandrake 9.1 and RH9 on the laptops, and while at a clients
ended up having to run them off batteries - they each lasted over 2
hours... which I found to be fairly amazing.

>From the very beginning the BIOS settings have been set to use maximum
power for CPU, disk, and screen.

My guess is that the Win98 was hitting the disk quite often (for reasons
unknown) and that ate up the power.  The apps I was running on Linux
basically read the hard drive on start up and then ran fairly well right
out of RAM.

Anecdotal evidence...




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