Whenever I run fluxbox, my laptop battery seems to drain faster, even faster than Windows 7! *gasp!* I say I get about an hour and a half on flux compared to about 3 and a half in Windows. I don't know much about managing power with such a minimal window manager. What would you guys suggest?

I do have another questions, but I wanted to refrain from posting two threads. I run linux on several of my computers, but would like to keep my desktops and files in sync between computers. I looked into network authentication, but as I understand it, OpenLDAP is build for client only by default and PAM doesn't play nice with Slack. What would be the best way to get a consistent experience on both machines?

Thanks for the help.

1.look here:http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13...op-mode-tools/
hope this can help.
2.how about using dropbox?

You could try xfce4-power-manager.

Are you sure that fluxbox is the culprit? On my PC fluxbox consumes a neglible amount of CPU time (conky uses more).

Maybe there is a problem with your power management.

There is no way fluxbox could be responsible. You must not be using any power saving programs or tools, like stated above.

Ok I am trying laptop-mode-tools. I will use it throughout the day and will let you know how it goes.

Well laptop-mode hasn't really helped much. I decided to turn off fluxbox and let my computer sit at the command line for a little while. The screen goes black after 3 minutes. I came back from some errands (45 minutes max) and it went from 45% to 25% doing nothing at the CLI. I cannot figure out what is draining the battery so much. Any tools to help me determine?

Actually, windows 7 does a very good job at powersaving out-of-the-box. Anyway, make sure cpu frequency scaling is working for your laptop. setting the spindown time for your hard disk won't do much (if it's your only disk) unless you decide to stop syslog, and move temp to your ram.

Just think logical. Try powersaving on the parts that consume most power. Cpu frequency scaling, harddisk, screen bacnklight intensity. Set your dvd drive to standby. Stuff like that. But for sure fluxbox is not the cause of this.

Frequency is mostly at 800MHz when its idle (based on conky). I changed all the settings in laptop-mode-tools to enable spinning down disks, etc. Didn't help any :/

What's the CPU fan doing? Do you have the fan module loaded? You may also want to check GPU fan too.

Fan is running constantly. Not sure what you mean by fan module.

Did you use "top" to check out the CPU usage? Maybe there is some background task keeping the CPU awake.

If the fan is running constantly at full speed that would use up power pretty fast I would imagine.

Do 'lsmod | grep fan' and possibly 'lsmod | grep acpi' to see what's loaded.

If the first command returns nothing then 'modprobe fan'