I've been fooling around with my laptop trying to squeek out some more battery life, and had a few questions...

(I'm running mandrake 9.2)

1. I've set hdparm to spin down my hard drive after a short period of I think 30 seconds or something. However, there is some sneaky something accessing my hard drive about every 20 seconds or so, just for one or two seconds, and just often enough to keep my hard drive from staying spun down. I've disabled all the logging services in DrakXServives, and run the 'top' command in the terminal to see what services are running. I have a suspicion about 'minilogd' but don't know how to shut it off. Anyone know how to turn of that service or if I can?

1.1 Any other thoughts on what might be acccessing my hdd?

2. How can I get my backlight to shutoff when my screen blanks? I have a Toshiba laptop; does this mean I'll have to get some Toshiba-specific utils to work with DPMS on my system to do this?

2.1 I've also read only a bit about that stuff but haven't tried anything. Are there some good links to check out other than The Battery-Powered Linux MINI-HOWTO?

There 'tis... as we say down here.

Thanks,
Jon

the 2.6 kernel introduces a lot of powersaving features, I would start there.

i would like to try to do things without having to recompile my kernel if that's possible (don't ask me why, i have my reasons :-D). However, I did download the kernel source for 2.6 just in case things turn out that-a-way. Thanks for the suggestion.

ciao,
Jon