Hello,

I've installed Arch on my Precision M4600, dual booting with windows 7. On the latter a full charged barrtery can last ~3h45, but on arch only 1h30 max.
Also, when i unplug ac power, arch doesn't seem to change its behaviour, ie screen brightness is still at max etc (it recognises it is on battery though, systray icon changes).

I'm using gnome 3 and the default gnome power manager is crap, so how can i change computer's behaviour on battery/ac power ?

Thanks.

Hi,
need some expert advice. I am running Kubuntu 11.04 (natty narwhal) on a toshiba netbook (2GB, Atom processor) and while the OS works nicely, it drinks the juice out of my battery way too fast. I realize this is because Kubuntu is probably too heavy an OS for a netbook and that a sensible thing to do would be to look for lighter distros.

But here's my question:
I like Kubuntu 11.04. It seems to be working well. What can I do to improve its battery performance in general. I do all the reasonable things already and don't do crazy things like stream videos a whole lot etc. Are there any apps that run in the background by default, that i can kill and get out of the autostart, for example?
Am a newbie to linux, so any help is welcome. I'd like to stay with kubuntu if i can but am willing to change if there is really nothing else that can be done but move to another distro.

Cheers!
Nat

Did you try anything from this page https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop ?

Yes I tried, but got problems.

For example,here's the output of cpufreq-info:

Power usage varies enormously with distro and doesn't seem to be predictable:
http://www.carstenboysenjensen.com/e...tery-test.html
There are some useful tips at
http://www.lesswatts.org/

Hi David,

Thanks for the links. I had particularly wanted to know about KDE, and the first article gives a plausible reason by suggesting that it may have to do with how much a system causes a drive to spin.

"I recorded some variations like disabling/enabling applets in kde. But it didn't make a difference. Likewise for the level of eyecandy in KDE. I also logged CPU usage and number of processes in some of the tests. That didn't help me see a pattern other than they being roughly the same across distributions and environments. I also did a few test to see if filesystems and using noatime at mount-time made a difference. There were little or no difference. My best guess on why some systems have better batterytime would be that these systems doesn't spin-up the drive too much."

I would add further that this causes increased heating of the drive and therefore the fan is on constantly to cool it (the fan is indeed on in my case almost all the time - I have only a netbook with limited memory/processor capabilities, and there is perhaps greater read/write to disk than in better equipped laptops. This fan drains the battery power in a hurry.

Nat