Hi!
I’m a newbie in Opensuse 11, i’m using it in my laptop about three weeks, i did the upgrade to kde 4.1, put everything working fine with some adjustments i just have one problem…
When i’m using only battery, even in energy saving mode, it only lasts around 45 minutes… when i had windows it was about 1h30 minimum…
I don’t know if a need to change some configuration… i couldn’t find any info about this.
My laptop is a Acer 1694 wmli, 2.0 GHz, 1gb ddr2, ati radeon x700…
There are many variables here. Like what powersave settings you employed in Vista and then Suse. Battery life is one of things compromised on by manufacturers in producing Laptops for a price!
I don’t know what the power consumption ratio is between Vista and openSUSE. It would be interesting to know. I get about 3-4 hrs continuous use from mine in SUSE. Never run Vista for more than 10mins, about the time it takes to boot.!!
My laptop is 3 years old.
I never installed vista in my laptop, i had xp.
I configured powersave settings to put cpu into powersaving mode.
But the difference between dinamically or energy save is about 2/3 minutes…
I’m afraid this is expected. Linux doesn’t play well with laptop batteries. Newer kernels are being tweaked to consume less power, but so far I have never seen a Linux being up to par with XP in that area.
Maybe you could try this: Laptop Mode Tools
I’ve never really tried it, but maybe it helps.
If anyone had try it with openSuse, please post some feedback.
Have you tried Lithium (the new replacement for Kpowersave)? It seems to have somewhat different settings by default that may suit you better. I thought that battery mode (powersave) was fairly aggressive, but I don’t know how much difference it makes. It also looks like in time it will expose more of powersave’s functionality. At the very least, it looks nicer in KDE4. I get around 3+ hours, but can’t compare to Windows since the laptop never had it installed!