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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."
anyone who doesn't run powertop is just blindly ignorant, basically. Those are the people who post questions like in the summary.
Really, powertop let me get over 2 hours out of an Asus c90. Those things usually die in under an hour without it.
To start with, I'd guess the problem is DFO related. Dumb Fucking Operator. To be cute, he used the word 'downgraded', which is a gentle way of saying he was too ignorant to know that Visa works just fine. Ever influenced by the popular opinion of the uninformed, he installs Windows XP because he's not going to be fooled like the rest of those 'idiots'. Oh the irony.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
.config or GTFO AC also ... you're probably using an ATI card (doesn't support power management) which means you're being and idiot. Stop being and idiot you idiot.