Shorter battery life on laptop with SuSE 8.1 ?
Hi, list users! I finally decided to make my laptop happy by replacing its SuSE 7.1 with the brand new 8.1 Pro. So, I made a clean new install from DVD. By the way, it was a pleasant surprise to get the job done in no more than 30 min.(OK, I had some minor problems with apm/acpi ons and offs, but solved them by putting apm=on, acpi=off in my kernel boot line). Just for reference, the laptop is HP OmniBook 6000 (PIII/850MHz/256MbRAM). Now, I can not believe myself, but it seems that my laptop's battery life decreased significantly after this upgrade. Here, by "significantly", I mean: it's not above 3 hours any more, but just about 2 hours, or even less. Thus, it is more than 30% decrease. I think I remember someone on this list mentioned power consumption of ReiserFS. May that be the cause of the problem, since I used ext before? If that is true, what could be the file system of choice for laptops, regarding battery consumption. I would like to avoid by all means experiments, like e.g. to reformat/revert back to 7.1, and check the battery life again. Any thoughts/hints/experience by list users highly appreciated. TIA Radule Soskic
On Friday 01 November 2002 04:40 am, Radule Soskic wrote:
Hi, list users!
I finally decided to make my laptop happy by replacing its SuSE 7.1 with the brand new 8.1 Pro. So, I made a clean new install from DVD. By the way, it was a pleasant surprise to get the job done in no more than 30 min.(OK, I had some minor problems with apm/acpi ons and offs, but solved them by putting apm=on, acpi=off in my kernel boot line). Just for reference, the laptop is HP OmniBook 6000 (PIII/850MHz/256MbRAM).
Now, I can not believe myself, but it seems that my laptop's battery life decreased significantly after this upgrade. Here, by "significantly", I mean: it's not above 3 hours any more, but just about 2 hours, or even less. Thus, it is more than 30% decrease.
I think I remember someone on this list mentioned power consumption of ReiserFS. May that be the cause of the problem, since I used ext before? If that is true, what could be the file system of choice for laptops, regarding battery consumption.
I sincerly doubt reiser has much to do with your battery run time. The only thing it affects is periodic syncing the disk and all the other FSs do that too. You can set your mail check time longer and achieve savings in disk useage if you feel its useds too much. But you might need to find out if that machine supports acpi and if so get it setup properly so as to allow throttling. If only apm make sure apmd is loaded and configured. -- _________________________________________________ No I Don't Yahoo! And I'm getting pretty sick of being asked if I do. _________________________________________________ John Andersen / Juneau Alaska
John Andersen wrote:
On Friday 01 November 2002 04:40 am, Radule Soskic wrote:
Now, I can not believe myself, but it seems that my laptop's battery life decreased significantly after this upgrade. Here, by "significantly", I mean: it's not above 3 hours any more, but just about 2 hours, or even less. Thus, it is more than 30% decrease.
I think I remember someone on this list mentioned power consumption of ReiserFS. May that be the cause of the problem, since I used ext before? If that is true, what could be the file system of choice for laptops, regarding battery consumption.
I sincerly doubt reiser has much to do with your battery run time. The only thing it affects is periodic syncing the disk and all the other FSs do that too. You can set your mail check time longer and achieve savings in disk useage if you feel its useds too much.
But you might need to find out if that machine supports acpi and if so get it setup properly so as to allow throttling. If only apm make sure apmd is loaded and configured.
I missed apmd. Sorry for this posting. I really remember there was some discussion about "..my HDD doesn't sleep with reiserfs..." or something like that in the past. This encouraged me to post before thorough investigation. As I said, I did some experimenting with boot. Acpi=on did not work, but apm=on worked, so I mistakingly presumed this was enough for apm to get started. Also, the battery indicator in system tray became alive after this, making me believe that my apm actually works. Now, I checked it and found that apmd was not running at all. Mr.Anderson, thank you for the hints. I hope my battery will do OK now. :-) Best regards, Radule Soskic
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Radule Soskic