So I am looking at getting a new laptop in the next month or two and I like decent performance but battery is key for me too cause I am very mobile. So my two questions with opensuse KDE is it possible to get 5 to 6 hours of battery life. I ask because I used to have a Dell that got about 5 hours with Windows and only 3 with Ubuntu. So would a 8 cell get me that kind of juice or should I look at 9 cell? I hope the 8 cell can because I am looking at a Asus laptop due to all I read about is Asus being number one in reliability cause of there build quality.
Also opinion on Hp laptops? I hear a lot of bad things about them.
HP laptops are fragile. In particular, the power socket on the motherboard breaks very frequently - I’ve seen this on 6 out of 8 HP laptops over the last few years. Repair is expensive - often more than the machine is worth.
In contrast, Lenovo (IBM as was) thinkpads are tough, and I still have several running just fine after 4 years. I recently bought 15 Lenovo laptops, and the people using them thunk they’re great.
Battery life at 6 hours is a stretch - buy an extra battery would be my advice. Long battery life usually means doing nothing very compute intensive - watching videos etc is out.
On the other hand, I bought an Asus Transformer TF101 Android tablet a month or so ago. For all usual tasks, it’s amazing - battery life is over 8 hours while watching full HD video, and stretches to 16 with the keyboard dock. I now take it with me everywhere, as I’m very mobile as well. It even comes with an office suite, which the keyboard dock unit makes practical. I still have my laptop, so any real heavy work is still possible, but I find I’m leaving it behind more and more often, and just taking the tablet.
Not perhaps what you want to hear on a SuSE forum, but Android is Linux after all, and my laptop is SuSE exclusively
Thinkpads are indeed tough, or at least they feel it, but be very careful to distinguish between Thinkpads and other laptops made by Lenovo; the Lenovo non-Thinkpads aren’t really any tougher that anyone else’s consumer laptops. Not that I’ve any real complaints about a non-Thinkpad from Lenovo - the charger cable just broke, but it looks like the same charger on Thinkpads and non-Thinkpads (after a few years, the strain relief on the connector becomes brittle, it breaks and becomes a strain concentrator, and, from then, the life of the cable is limited…but, at least, you can get an aftermarket charger reasonably cheaply.)
Agreed. Out of the box battery life on Linux just doesn’t seem to be quite as good as some other operating systems. That said, with powertop, and something like Jupiter or tuned you ought top be able to narrow the gap a bit. 6 hours will still be a stretch, though. Maybe you have to be able to compromise compute power to minimise power power (ie, choose a feeble processor and graphics solution).
Hi, I am using currently an Lenovo X201 with a Corei5 M520. The machine came with a nine cell li-ion battery. If you use kernel 3.04 with power-top from Intel and you renounce (by switching off) the consumers you do not need you can come with this notebook easily to 5:30 h of runtime. With kernel 3.2 this should get substantially better (also with 3.1) because the energy saving status RC 6 can be switched on (with a noteworthy spare of energy). In 3.1 you have to do this manually because apparently one user reported problems so the kernel 3.1 will come with the function switched of by default. You do this by:
i915_enable_rc6=1
or with the kernel start parameters:
i915_enable_rc6=1
.
A site where you can find good laptop energy saving advices for laptops with Intel chipset is: LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux
There are a lot of sites out there if you google that give advices. My personal experience: avoid buying a laptop without umts/3g integrated card. Umts-modems branched via BT, USB or else in tethering are really power “destroyers”. Better to have an integrated card. My Lenovo came with an unbranded Gobi2000 (if you can get you hand on a Huawei one this might be better because more Linux friendly AFAIK.
Deactivate always WLAN if you do not use it. The same is for Bluetooth. The choice of the HDD is also interesting. There are huge differences with hardware, I myself opted for a seagate momentus. Western digital has also some low consumption disks.
My X201 came with a “no glare” 12" LED (which is important, glare forces you to higher illuminations outside with more consumption, and LED costs less battery life then normal incandescence back-light illumination). The weight of the 9 cells is outweighed by the far higher duration of autonomy. Take care to note that the 9 cell accumulator is larger then the normal one.
Hope that helps.
On Sun, 09 Oct 2011 09:06:02 +0000, markone wrote:
> Agreed. Out of the box battery life on Linux just doesn’t seem to be
> quite as good as some other operating systems. That said, with powertop,
> and something like ‘Jupiter’ (http://www.jupiterapplet.org/) or ‘tuned’
> (https://fedorahosted.org/tuned/) you ought top be able to narrow the
> gap a bit. 6 hours will still be a stretch, though. Maybe you have to be
> able to compromise compute power to minimise power power (ie, choose a
> feeble processor and graphics solution).
There are some pretty well documented issues with the latest power
management stuff on Linux - apparently a kernel issue is at the core. I
recall seeing a workaround that makes things somewhat better, but
ultimately, it’s going to require a kernel fix (at least from what I
read).
recommendation depends on budget and what you want to do with your hardware games/movies/internet/programming/etc
re: your battery, don’t know why your battery dries so quickly on ubuntu as my dell has 4 years already and with 48% of battery health, openuse goes 33% longer than windows 7…
in my opinion, option you should consider is tablet, I got my one not long ago and I nearly stopped using laptop, any internet browsing/emailing/videos/etc I do on tablet, but again getting tablet depends on your budget and needs research…
I have a brand new Asus Transformer TF101-B1 , which arrived only a few hours ago. I have NOT yet switched it ON. I currently have it plugged in the wall, charging for at least 8 hours (per the user guide) before I try to set it up. I don’t have the keyboard/docking station yet, so I plan to buy (probably order this weekend) :
Mobile Docking-Station/Keyboard
USB Extension Kit (which plugs into docking station outlet and provides a USB connection for a USB stick)
HDMI to VGA Adaper (so it can drive presentations on projectors in business meetings, where a VGA interface is needed)
I have not decided yet if I should also buy:
Capacitive Stylus (as my fingers tend to be big and clumsy)
non-glare protective transparent cover for the touchpad screen
Have you tried to interface your Transformer to openSUSE yet? I’ve read one can simply do some appropriate edits to udev rules (and also possibly install MTPFS (or is it just MTP)) and the Transformer will hot plug automount. I have not read of any openSUSE users doing this, but I have read of other distribution users doing this, so I don’t see why it would not work in openSUSE.
Any must have apps ? Of course email, browser, skype (to chat with my 85+ year old mother) are on my list. I’m also thinking of custom weather program, scanner software, translation software, ebook reading software, movie player, photo album software, office software (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, … ) , drawing/pix editing program … None of which I have researched. The ONLY game that interests me is ‘chess’, so I might put a ‘chess program’ on it. But I have no idea as to precisely which apps, if any, are superior than others. I’ll find out tomorrow when I switch the Tablet ON for the 1st time.
