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Why Is Linux Notebook Battery Life Still Poor?
Ganty writes "I recently purchased a Lenovo W500 notebook, and after 'downgrading' to XP and creating a dual partition, I found that I had a battery life of nearly three hours using the long-life battery, at this point I was a happy camper because it means that I can watch a DVD during a flight. I then tried various Linux distributions and found the battery life under FOS to be very disappointing, with an average of 45 minutes before a warning message. After settling on Ubuntu I then spent three days trying various hardware tweaks but I only managed to increase the battery life to one and a half hours. Unwanted services have been disabled, laptop mode has been enabled, the dual core CPU reduces speed when idle and the hard drive spins down when not needed. Obviously Apple with their X86 hardware and BSD based OS have got it right because the MacBooks last for hours, and a stock install of MS Windows XP gives me three hours of life. Why is battery life on notebooks so poor when using Linux? Some have suggested disabling various hardware items such as bluetooth and running the screen at half brightness but XP doesn't require me to do this and still gives a reasonable battery life."
Linux is a popular choice for netbooks,
That stopped being true when Windows XP began being sold on netbooks over a year ago. Linux is now relegated back to the same niche status it holds on the desktop.
This isn't a general problem - do you really think people would be running Linux on laptops at all if their battery life went from 3 hours on Windows to 40 minutes on Linux?
I happily get much longer battery life on my Linux laptops, because they're much more configurable. A couple of years ago I watched three movies in a row on my 17-inch Dell laptop on an international flight - this machine gets three hours with a tailwind running Windows and doing much of anything. How did I do it? I loaded the movies into a RAM disk and set the hard drive to power down, shut off syslog, and removed the DVD drive completely. Try that on a Windows box!
Notwithstanding trickery, I also get better life in normal use as well.
Please choose a title like "Why does my laptop get bad battery life on Linux"? And post it on a Linux support board, not on Slashdot.
*sigh*, no he wants to know if the distro is shipping the tickles, pre-compiled kernel you incompetent shithead.
Here be signatures
If you want your computer to work in the background and be a tool that makes you money, get a mac. If you want to try it and your free time is worth it, by all means give Linux a try. I started to use Linux around 2000. I switched to Apple back in 2002 and haven't looked back. I deal with technology all day long. If our desktops & laptop systems aren't working, then we're wasting time and money making those work instead of making bug fixes and adding new features to our software products that make us money.
Not too long ago, we installed OpenSuSE on a machine for testing one of our desktop JAVA apps to make sure it would run on Linux. We went and grabbed an off the shelf PCI wifi card to put in it. Card was made in 2003 and I still had to use the NDIS wrapper to get it to work.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.