On 02/02/2007 12:38 AM somebody named M Harris wrote:

On Thursday 01 February 2007 23:21, Mark Panen wrote:

...

I bought a new one on Monday and it is supposed to get up to 4 hours but i only get 1 hour 40 minutes. I have charged and discharged the battery a couple of times. The time you are getting is 'bout normal...

... there are many things you can do to cut back on the current drain. 1) reduce the cpu operating frequency (bios) if your unit allows for this 2) reduce the up-time of the hd drive motor (timer) 3) reduce the brightness of the lcd, and up-time of the monitor (timer) 4) turn of peripherals when not used... including wan, wifi, modems, etc 5) set a suspend timer 6) suspend instead of booting 7) set lcd to power down (timer) instead of running a screen saver

You may need to fully cycle (charge-discharge) your new battery several times before you will see optimum performance.

I have never had more than 2.5 hours from my laptop (ThinkPad R30) under optimal loading. Obviously this is completely subjective.

There's two issues at play. One is what I call "sales speak", specifically the wording, "you'll get *up to*...." Occasionally I'll reply, "Well, I'll pay you *up to* [their stated price]." (This usually gets a laugh.) The point is that "up to four hours" does include "two hours", "five minutes", or any amount of time under "four hours". In brief, "up to four hours" is a promising way to say almost nothing. Secondly, and as M Harris wrote, there are several factors which determine battery life. Years ago, when these batteries (this Dell I600m has an optional second battery with approximately the same capacity as the primary battery) were new, and when I was for testing purposes implementing most of the measures cited above, I got more than 7.5 hours in a session, this without suspending during that time. To get this amount of battery time, I implemented most, but not all, of the measures cited above. This Inspiron came with (because I wanted it) the so-called Mobile Technology. This is a concept, from my understanding, pioneered by Linus Torwalds which induces the CPU to adapt to the CPU load: when the demands on the CPU are lower, the CPU runs more slowly, as little as 10% of its rated speed. This "stepping" of the CPU to different speeds is, moreover, tunable in the BIOS and can be performed also when logged in as root. More info can be found (in 9.3 anyway) at "man powersaved". If you don't have a stepping CPU, your battery is going to drain a lot faster. Another factor (call it #8), then, is the demand placed on the hardware by the number and kind of processes which are running. (a) The greater the load placed on the system, the more CPU cycles will be required, and the higher the CPU will have to step to accommodate it. (b) Similarly, if you don't have enough RAM, your system will resort to swap, causing the drive to spin more. Spinning the drive consumes much more electricity than does RAM. Optimally, your system should hardly ever touch swap; at the same time, having RAM that is never used consumes energy without benefit to the system. So tune the amount of RAM in your system to accommodate memory usage. Another source of savings which can be had for free (only your time) relates to (a) above: compiling your code. I would imagine that most people using Intel-achitecture simply download and install the i686 binaries. Compiling the source code which has been configured to your hardware can save a lot of CPU cycles, make the code run a lot faster, and so too save some battery. Also related to (a), and more obvious, is to shut down daemons which aren't being used. This is a good idea from a security standpoint as well. hth, ken -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Dňa Pi 2. Február 2007 M Harris napísal:

On Thursday 01 February 2007 23:21, Mark Panen wrote:

...

I bought a new one on Monday and it is supposed to get up to 4 hours but i only get 1 hour 40 minutes. I have charged and discharged the battery a couple of times.

The time you are getting is 'bout normal...

... there are many things you can do to cut back on the current drain. 1) reduce the cpu operating frequency (bios) if your unit allows for this 2) reduce the up-time of the hd drive motor (timer) 3) reduce the brightness of the lcd, and up-time of the monitor (timer) 4) turn of peripherals when not used... including wan, wifi, modems, etc 5) set a suspend timer 6) suspend instead of booting 7) set lcd to power down (timer) instead of running a screen saver

You may need to fully cycle (charge-discharge) your new battery several times before you will see optimum performance.

I have never had more than 2.5 hours from my laptop (ThinkPad R30) under optimal loading. Obviously this is completely subjective.

hello, on my thinkpad R60 and suse 10.2 is OS writing to disk every cca 3-5 second. So there is no way to switch to standby mode. I don't know which process. Is it possible discover process which writes something to disk??? I have 2GB of ram. thanks, m.

hi, I have two "storage" computers (suse 10.0 and 10.2) and I keep on them my files I share on home network. Now, I'm looking for an application that I can sync content of specific folders on each boxes. Any recommendation? Thanks for any help. -afan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Afan Pasalic wrote:

hi, I have two "storage" computers (suse 10.0 and 10.2) and I keep on them my files I share on home network. Now, I'm looking for an application that I can sync content of specific folders on each boxes. Any recommendation?

rsync? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Thanks for post. Is there any GUI based application? -afan

On Saturday 03 February 2007, Afan Pasalic wrote:

...

hi, I have two "storage" computers (suse 10.0 and 10.2) and I keep on them my files I share on home network. Now, I'm looking for an application that I can sync content of specific folders on each boxes. Any recommendation?

Thanks for any help.

-afan

unison

Its secure, its intelligent, its easy to set up, there are packages for it in opensuse.

All transfers are done via ssh. It can selectively skip certain files or types. It preserves permissions to the extent possible. Its bi-directional, unlike rsync, with intelligent conflict detection.

You can schedule it via cron, or run it manually, either at the CLI or via the GUI.

It even supports windows boxes.

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

-- _____________________________________ John Andersen

-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Dňa Pi 2. Február 2007 jdd napísal:

Michal Hlavac wrote:

...

on my thinkpad R60 and suse 10.2 is OS writing to disk every cca 3-5 second. So there is no way to switch to standby mode. I don't know which process. Is it possible discover process which writes something to disk??? I have 2GB of ram.

look at cron

there are no cron tasks and also rchal stop has no affect... interval is about 3-5 seconds when disk has activity... some ideas?? thanks, m.

On Friday 02 February 2007 13:06, Michal Hlavac wrote: ...

on my thinkpad R60 and suse 10.2 is OS writing to disk every cca 3-5 second. So there is no way to switch to standby mode. I don't know which process. Is it possible discover process which writes something to disk??? I have 2GB of ram.

The hald is the culprit. rchal stop will stop hald from scanning for a new hardware, but then you have to mount CD/DVD and USB memory stick manually. Once before with SuSEwatcher it worked, but now when devices are created as needed with udev, I don't know. Appropriate desktop link with script can do that, or just rchal start insert CD, wait until it is mounted and than again stop it. -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

...

What kind of battery time do you guys get on your notebooks ? I bought a new one on Monday and it is supposed to get up to 4 hours but i only get 1 hour 40 minutes. I have charged and discharged the battery a couple of times. I wonder if it's the wireless that takes all the power.The battery meter kpowersave freezes sometimes as well.

Mark Hi .

I have a Compaq Presario 5030 64bit laptop with every thing screwed down tight i can just about squeeze 3 hours out of the battery .

As M.Harris has said go thru every thing and if not needed haveit turned off i find the backlight on the display and the CPU are the big killers ..

Hmmm... interesting... I have an early Centrino laptop (1.4Ghz), and when it was new, I was easily able to get around 5 hours on the battery on normal use (ie not gaming or compiling), and if I tweaked everything as M.Harris suggests, I could push that just over 6 hours if I limited activity to things like email, web browsing, document editing, and did not use the WiFi. Of course now that it's a few years old, the battery life has reduced. Of course that's Centrino, and they were built with low power consumption in mind. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org