I think I read that somewhere. Is it true?

I use slack 10 with 2.6.9 kernel. It does use a little more battery, but that is because the CPU throttling isn't as good as with windows. The laptop is meant to be used with windows. I'd say it isn't that noticible though, especially with the new ACPI patches.

Linux has a lot more disk activity, like writing to logs, which keeps the harddrive more active. You could try to suspend the drive using hdparm like;
# /usr/sbin/hdparm -c3 -S10 /dev/hda
You'll still see the disk come alive pretty often, unless you disable some of the logs and other stuff.
man hdparm for more info. Also google laptop battery life of something like that for ideas from others with the same problem.

I beg to differ, I feel that my laptop has better battery performance
than windows xp. I can compare, because I have a dual boot. I am using
cpufreqd and cpudyn to throttle back the cpu. Also cpudyn can slow down
the hard drive speed. As cpudyn installs a rc script in /etc/rc.d which
is great. When ac adapter is plugged in, my cpu runs at 1.12 Ghz, then
when I need it runs at full speed 1.70 Ghz. When running off battery
it runs a 600 Mhz, then when I need it it jumps up to 1.12 Ghz. I
like running at 600 Mhz, when I am just web browsing because I never
here the fan running.

-tank

See there, tank728 has some good laptop battery life ideas. I knew there was some utilities out there to extend the battery life longer than XP.

tank, are there slack packages for these 2 progs or do i need to build from sorce. also, what about kernel config, anything there that needs to be enabled?
my ibm(a30) gets horrible bat life

thanks for any help

I have built packages for both cpufreqd and cpudyn. I have not
throughly tested the cpudyn package, but it works great for me.
as for the kernel, you need to have cpufreqd[*] built in to the
kernel, and not as a module. I am on an ibm T41.

Note: my cpufreqd.conf file was left alone, but the rc script
that cpudyn has I edited slightly to reflect the hard drive settings

Packages
cpufreqd: ftp://tank728.no-ip.org/pub/slackpac...2.2-i686-1.tgz
cpudyn: ftp://tank728.no-ip.org/pub/slackpac...1.0-i686-1.tgz

Good Luck

-tank

thanks, ill give them a shot

installed it, but when i restart i have to manually start cpudyn by ./rc.cpudyn. is there a way to auto start this?

add
/etc/rc.d/rc.cpudyn

to /etc/rc.d/local

this will start it at boot time
along with any other commands

-tank

yea i was going to do that but just thought that the install would make this executable and totally set it up.

off to edit it now. thanks