Laptop battery life
 

Hi,

I have an Acer Aspire 5735(about a year old) laptop on which I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10. After installing I noticed really poor battery life, probably not even an hour while using the computer/browsing etc. I have read plenty of forums that all seem to state that Ubuntu 9.10 is a bit of a disaster when it comes to battery life, requiring a lot of hardware modifications(cpu frequency scaling, laptop mode etc). I am thinking of trying another distro to see if that makes a difference. I am new to Linux and am trying to avoid having to make complicated configuration changes when I don't really know what I'm doing. Are there any distros that anyone could recommend that might be better in terms battery life out of the box? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!


....Sorry for the duplicate thread. Managed to find another that answers my question!

You can use pu freq front end to limit the processor speed. I do mine at ondemand.
If you are npt using wireless, disable it.
Use a desktop that requires less power. LXDE for me.
There may be a battery recalibration tool within the BIOS menu, use it.
I found a gateway m275- three actually by me and my girlfriend- and the batteries don't last long. I use thse tricks. Longest battery lasts 1 hour with wireless and 1:20 without. Using lxde adds another 5 to 10 minutes.
Disable any extensions and turn off unnecessary services. That means run alsa only- no pulse. Turn off 3d acceleration and you can cut out gstreamer.
Firefox with noscript and use about:config to trim use.
Also using dillo where you don't need java(script)- search engines- will help.

I've used etoile and enlightenment also for notebooks.

Thanks for those tips, much appreciated! Unfortunately I wouldn't know how to implement most of these, at least not yet! I think I am going to give Linux Mint a go, see how that works without any tweaking. Cheers!

It sounds like a good time to learn then doesn't it? I mean this is really how you learn about Linux, taking each problem as it pops up and learning to solve it. Then after awhile you find you have quite a bit of knowledge.

If you wish to go with a different distro try googling first to see if there is one that works best for your machine. I don't know if Mint would be any better since it is based off of Ubuntu. The funny thing is that Ubuntu 9.10, inspite of its flaws, gave me the longest battery life on my Acer Aspire One netbook.

Regardless of the distro, following Mr-Bisquit's advice will help extend the battery. Google each topic if you don't understand or ask for more information.

In any distro, you'll have to do some configuring of the various power-saving options, but I'm finding that KDE 4.3.X makes it REALLY easy. I don't know how well KDE does on netbooks.

In addition to the normal stuff, look for CPU frequency scaling. (I'm not sure if netbooks have this...)

Hi,

Thanks for all the advice. I am aware that it's best to just learn how to accomplish these things, it's just finding the time! Well, I seem to be getting about 1.5 hours now with Mint. And I actually like version of Gnome installed with it, very nice. I noticed you can add a cpu frequency scale monitor to your panel in the desktop which allows you to choose different settings. Mine is set to ondemand by default. What do the conservative and powersave settings do? Just out of curiosity?

Don't mark your thread as "solved" if you still have questions!!

Names like "conservative" and "powersave" are typically used for profile containing a set of rules. Somewhere you can change the settings in each profile.