i have a lenovo ideapad Y500, using Fedora 18 and Win7, but mostly fedora so i can't really speak for the battery life when windows is running, but while i have fedora going it seems like the battery drains pretty quickly. Does anyone experience this or have a solution? Seems like the settings in power manager are optimal.

Right now it says i'm at 5% and it will be done charging in 6 minutes. then it will usually say 2 hours life at 100%, but i don't feel thats accurate.

What does that tell you?

Battery 0: Charging, 14%, 00:05:10 until charged
Battery 0: design capacity 590 mAh, last full capacity 605 mAh = 100%

To calculate real-world battery life from manufacturer-claimed battery life, take the square root of the claimed life and divide the result by ten. If the battery is more than three months old, divide the result by ten again. Then buy an AC power adapter.

The same formula may be used for cell phones, MP3 players, etc.

Why not run the Win install for a battery charge/discharge cycle and see how it compares, then you know if you have a problem with linux power settings or something else (hardware settings, battery damage?)

For saving battery power you could always turn on laptop mode
By running this command under root. # echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode this should ave you some
Power if laptop mode is not turned on hope this helps.

That's very odd. I have a laptop with a defect battery. It has 0% capacity and turns off immediately when removing the power adapter. But it reports last full capacity as a very low number. So if there was something wrong with your battery it should say a lower last full capacity.

The 5 minutes from 14% to 100% strikes me as very odd though.

Perhaps you can carefully compile your own Kernel and see of there are some changes you should make, ideally, and if it will make any difference. Start with ACPI settings.

well i understand that over time batteries don't hold a charge like they used to but what i'm getting at is it originally had windows 8 and i could go 2 days(not constant use) using it here or there and it still have alot of battery life left and now it seems its always under 50 percent. Is linux generally a more power consuming OS? i think i read somewhere that the way microsoft os's work is even if you have multi cores it will always use 1 fully before it moves on to the next. Could it be that all cpu's are running constantly, consuming alot of power? if so is there program or way to dial it back?

Hi iceman81,

I had the same problem under F19, I have a Dell Inspiron N5110 core i5.
The problem is simple, my laptop comes with two vga cards, built-in Intel and nVidia, Fedora was set to use the nVidia as the default causing power loss and heat problems.

The thing is my nVidia graphics card also supports 3D vision and HD sound adapter, which is too much under battery usage, in the other hand Win8 will download these drivers for you once connected to the internet, but with F19 (and preivous Fedora releases) yum won't do that for you.

See this post for more information http://thunderbirdtrr.blogspot.com/2...l#.UjjfAKxx21E.

You also can inspect this problem with several useful tools like powertop, bltk and lm_sensors.

Here is the documentation for bltk https://access.redhat.com/site/docum...uide/BLTK.html, look for man pages for powertop and sensors.

Hope this helps

i will definitely check those links out for sure, however i think i found a major battery killer. I didn't notice "on close lid" was set to lock screen not hibernate. Everytime i closed the lid it must have still been running?

It definitely won't help...

One other thing is that the default setting for the screen is at 100% brightness. You can reduce the brightness and this will have a direct effect on the battery life. Also if you are really interested, what I generally do is to "yum groupinstall xfce" although I usually use the gnome desktop. I do this because the battery settings are more comprehensive under xfce and I choose all my settings there. The download is only about 39 mb or so. You can try that if you are really interested.

There are some laptop modules in the Kernel like someone mentioned above. I think they are for Dell, and also one for Ibm, which is Lenovo, and perhaps some others. See if you find the module in the kernel and then just load it to see if that makes a difference.

[QUOTE=iceman81;5029440]i have a lenovo ideapad Y500, using Fedora 18 and Win7, but mostly fedora so i can't really speak for the battery life when windows is running, but while i have fedora going it seems like the battery drains pretty quickly. Does anyone experience this or have a solution? Seems like the settings in power manager are optimal.

I am having the exact same problem with fedora 20 and please dont suggest changing the brightness and all, I have already done that. Infact I have actually compared Win 7 and Fedora battery timings and with fedora my battery does not even run 1 hr, where as it runs for at least 1.5 with Win 7. Also I noticed that while on Fedora the system heats up more, even while doing normal operations. I believe that Iceman is right that Fedora does really work on peak performance all the time ,or probably it is using all the CPU cores. Please someone address this issue, many of my friends also have the same.

Have you tried what JAX mentions. I know for a fact that the cpu usage using the default drivers for fedora 20 is much higher than when you use the nvidia drivers. If you have one of these graphics cards, there are a number of tutorials on the net that will help you download and install the nvidia drivers for your particular card. Do a bit of reading first and don't jump on the first solution that appears because if you don't do it right, you will not get any display output.