I've got a Dell Inspiron 600M with Debian (Sarge) installed on it. I've been getting about 2 hours of battery life on a single charge out of it, which is significantly less than I believe I should be getting. The battery is almost brand new, mabe 4 months old, as well as the rest of the laptop. My girlfriend has the same exact laptop with Windows XP installed on it, and she gets 4-4:30 hours per charge out of hers. I believe mine did too, when I first got it, before I installed Debian on it. Does anyone have any idea how I could go about improving my battery life? Thanks for any help.

Linux consume more power than windows. This is I think because it uses the hard disk a lot more that windows. I don't know about 2.6 but the 2.4 kernels have the apm module:
do:
/sbin/lsmod
to see what modules you are running.
If you are not running apm, make sure you add
in a startup script.

Eklipz,

With all respect to perfect_circle, I believe the 600M can use acpi which is a newer and better form of power management. acpid is the service you want running. If you type `lsmod` at the command prompt you'll see a list of the modules (drivers) running on your system. If you see something like battery, ac, thermal ..., those are the acpi modules and if they're there, you have acpi running. If not, you may need to `apt-get install acpid`.

The biggest battery saver for your computer, though, will probably be enabling the automatic throttling back of your Pentium-M processor. This page: http://www.adventure-today.com/vaio/ helped me set mine up. Your stock Debian kernel may not have those modules by default, so you may have to re-compile it selecting the proper modules for this and putting the right command in your startup scripts to enable them.

Mark

I'm using Suse 9.2 pro on my 700m and I get a good +4 hours on it. The acpi packages and cpu throttling help tremendously.

the dell 600m supports two types of batterys, 4 cell with 32wh and 6cell eith 48wh. Your girlfriend might have one while you have the other... also, laptop mode scripts should help (spins down hd), powermanagement for your wlan card and lowering your lcds brightness. Also, make sure you have proper support for cpu-throttling. Suse 9.2-> and the new ubuntu distro are great for laptops

ok, I'm dual booting, and my battery life seems to be dwindeling. When I first got it, I was getting 3:30 to 4 hours, then I installed Debian sarge on it, and windows was still getting 3:30 to 4 hours, while debian was getting 3:00 hours. Now my windows battery has gone down to 3 hours while debian is at 2. My cpu is using the powernow option in the kernel, and I have acpi working. I don't have my wireless working in linux, and my screen is set to low brightness. Thoughts?

Have you tried to install laptop-mode (it is at least available on ubuntu, don't know about debian) Also, a new kernel might be recommended, Intel did not approve the centrino brand on Linux before kernel 2.6.8 (i think it was that kernel) due to the matureing of acpi and other powersaving functions in the kernel (I'm not sure which ones, guess it's only speedstep and acpi).

So get a recent kernel, laptop-mode and research powersaving on wireless cards ( I have only tried this on suse due to an easy gui, but everything else is working great in ubuntu)

I hate to be one of those who constantly nag about people haveing to change distros, but my experience conludes; for laptops, use Suse first, Ubuntu is pretty close, have no real experience with debian, but common sence concludes that it has got "poorer" laptop support (laptop support is pretty cutting edge for the moment, new things being improved all the time, since debian uses older stable versions some features might not be available), fedora lacks some features (most of all, I just don't like fedora) Mandrake (mandriva) also lacks features. the smaller a distro is, the more unlikely it is to include proper laptop support. my oppinion is; of course you can take a slackwareish distro and compile everything you need from source, but why bother more than one time for kicks, some people are actually doing these things for you...