Hi guys, I frequently pull out this old HP mini netbook for brief Internet browsing and some DOSBox gaming. A month ago I finally upgraded the RAM to the max 2GB; and this week replaced the old battery with a high capacity and updated the BIOS from F.10 to F.16.

The old battery was *very* old and swollen enough to crack the bottom plastic. At full charge XFCE power manager showed Voltage: 9.3V, Fully charged (design): 26.6Wh, and Fully charged: 9.4Wh (35%). While running on battery power with no programs open, I hovered the mouse over the icon to display the remaining charge, and watched as it dropped 1% every 20 seconds. The new battery is the full 11V and designed for 53Wh and so far is draining much more slowly with no open programs - 1% every ~2 minutes.


My concern now is drainage while the computer is shutdown. I normally shutdown from the XFCE panel, but the same thing happens if using 'shutdown -h now' from a terminal. I had the problem before with Debian 10 and solved it by creating a service to disable WOL. Since installing Debian 12 with XFCE 4.18 and kernel 6.1.0-13 I once again experience battery drain after shutting down. It will be fully charged when shutdown, and within 1 week it is below 25%. Granted this is on the old battery.

The new BIOS didn't add any new settings and there are no power/ACPI related settings; but I hope that if there was any ACPI bug the new BIOS patched it. The USB ports don't stay alive after shutdown - I tried both with a smart watch charger. I did a test yesterday with the old battery by removing it at full charge, and after 12 hours plugged it back in and was still full.

I've looked at systemd-inhibit and the only items listed are NetworkManager, ModemManager, UPower, xfce-power-manager, and xscreensaver. 'top' and 'sudo ps aux' don't show anything additional that stands out except maybe this one process:
/usr/bin/python3 /usr/share/system-config-printer/applet.py

I found a couple of forum threads elsewhere, one Gentoo and one Debian, where a similar drain was traced to hwclock. Is that the likely culprit and I am looking at expected behavior? Or is there anything else that might reduce drainage when shutdown (besides removing the battery)? Thanks!

That would give you about 3 hours battery life. There are things you can do to increase battery life, but you have to do them separately often.

• Switch to the kernel powersaver governor
• Set a rapidly acting black screensaver.
• Make the screen display dimmer.
• Introduce a rapid auto-suspend

being some of the main ones Another thing you could do it the budget allowed it is to buy an M1-M3 Apple Mac, as they are very power friendly. The Arm cpus and small wafer fab are very good that way.

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Thanks for the tips, business_kid. After charging the new battery overnight I unplugged it this morning leaving the computer off, and 12 hours later when I turned it on the battery meter was still 100%. It seems (so far) that the new battery and/or BIOS update solved the drain while powered off.

I will make use of your suggestions to reduce drain while in-use. I'm not sure about the kernel governor or auto-suspend, but I did go into power manager settings and found the settings to dim the screen when idle and to blank the screen after x minutes.

Regarding the M1-3 Mac you mention, I'm not a fan of Apple. Lol. I do have a power-friendly Win10 Geobook laptop for regular usage. I still like this old netbook, though, for portability and retrogaming

Back when I ran a M&A classmate touchscreen clamshell with a atom n270

I always kept the manual on file in ~/Documents folder cuz there is so much to remember

https://www.manua.ls/hp/mini-110-1116nr/manual

My Dell ll 8120 chromebook presently took it's place as my antiX linux chromebook that can run dosbox games now.

Hey, thanks for the manual idea. I keep some reference sheets in the bag with it, but not the whole manual.