Laptop battery life with opensuse 11.2.

[marcoslai]

I'm using Compaq Presario CQ40-115AU notebook,with AMD Turion 64x2 2.0GHz processor,AMD 780G board,integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphic card,2GB Kingston DDR2 667MHz RAM.
My 6 cell battery last for 2 hours with Ubuntu 9.04 amd64,but with openSUSE 11.2 KDE4.3.1 RC1 ,it reduce to 1 hour 20 minutes.
Anyone know what's the reason?

marcoslai wrote:
> I'm using Compaq Presario CQ40-115AU notebook,with AMD Turion 64x2
> 2.0GHz processor,AMD 780G board,integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphic
> card,2GB Kingston DDR2 667MHz RAM.
>
> My 6 cell battery last for 2 hours with Ubuntu 9.04
> amd64,but with openSUSE 11.2 KDE4.3.1 RC1 ,it reduce to 1 hour 20
> minutes.
> Anyone know what's the reason?
>
>

This is quite an interesting subject, battery life.

I just bought an uber big battery to my EeePC 900 and now I get 8 hours
of video over the network via UMTS. The original gave like two hours.

Some things that spend/save batteries are (I think):

Screen brightness
The length of time before screensaver starts
(Screensaver should just blank the screen)

If rotating hard disks present, their sleep times/intervals.
(EeePC has ssd drive)

Proc throttling
Fan

Else?

Vahis
--
"Sunrise 7:45am (EET), sunset 4:21pm (EET) at Espoo, Finland (8:36 hours
daylight)"
http://waxborg.servepics.com
Linux 2.6.25.20-0.5-default #1 SMP 2009-08-14 01:48:11 +0200 x86_64
5:56pm up 1 day 22:57, 10 users, load average: 0.17, 0.27, 0.24

[vatsers]

Unfortunately I also have seen the same problem with opensuse 11.2 on AMD laptop.

Prior to upgrading, while using Opensuse 11.1 I would get near 2 hrs of battery life, however after upgrading I am getting barely 1 hr.

I thought it might be the fancy gnome / compiz effect so I installed my favourite enlightenment (thx dmtry) however it had no effect, battery life is still poor.

Seems all good things aren't meant to last.

[growbag]

When on th desktop, press ctrl-escape and watch the task list.

I did a comparison about 8 months ago between KDE3 and KDE4 running under openSUSE 11.1 on my HP laptop. Not strictly "scientific", but based on "everyday use".

I found that KDE4 reduced my battery times.

The culprit is having too many plasmoids on your desktop, especially ones that access the net often.

Remove all your plasmoids and then look at the CPU usage again, you should see it drop to about 1% for xorg and kwin, and plasma-desktop shouldn't even rate.

With lots of plasmoids, you could be looking at upto 20% CPU wastage, and I found the Google Gadgets to be the worst offenders!

Of course if anything else is wasting CPU time in that ctrl-escape list, then you need to look at that too.

[vatsers]

Thanks for the response.
However I don't use plasmoids, google-gadgets etc.
My current setup is the same as I had before upgrading to 11.2, same applications, same plugins, same tools etc.
There are no cpu hogging processes in the top list and the usage is as it was in 11.1

The only difference is that my battery life has halved.

Thx

vatsers wrote:

>
> Thanks for the response.
> However I don't use plasmoids, google-gadgets etc.
> My current setup is the same as I had before upgrading to 11.2, same
> applications, same plugins, same tools etc.
> There are no cpu hogging processes in the top list and the usage is as
> it was in 11.1
>
> The only difference is that my battery life has halved.

I found one surprising thing that sucked the battery dry as you describe.
The wife wanted a pretty screen saver instead of the static or blank screen
I normally use. Some of the ones she want to try would actually use MORE
power than a running desktop! Sneaky. After running out of battery a few
times, she has come to see the light but this was one where she had to see
for herself instead of just being told.

--
Will Honea

[gminnerup]

Could it be that it's not the battery life as such but the way it's reported by the panel plasmoid? I get 3 hours under Vista out of the same laptop compared to 2 hours with openSUSE. Now the default power management setting is to shut down (or suspend) the laptop when Powerdevil THINKS it's down to whatever the percentage remaining is. Haven't tested this yet, but I will tomorrow: set it to "do nothing" and see how long it runs after allegedly being down to "0%".
Previous experience tells me that it's often only the calibration of whatever reports battery status. I've had laptops run under active usage for up to 45 minutes under Linux with "0%" reported. Doing that once or twice might recalibrate things, and give more realistic percentage figures.

[growbag]

That's exactly what I was thinking @gminnerup, the only true way to find out is to time it till it dies under both 11.1 and 11.2.

[TaraIkeda]

Battery usage is one of the issues linux seems not that good with, linux uses devices differently then windows and with most devices made mainly for windows its hard to linux to work with said devices.
2 hours is fair enough if you ask me though, I have a power cord.

[vatsers]

Thanks for reading.

However it appears to be a kernel bug, so I will have to wait for updated kernel, or maybe compile from source...

Bug 14424 – Enabled SMP causes hrtimer_start_range_ns (tick_sched_timer) wakeups

vatsers