[ltp] Aggressive battery diagnostics on T42p, should I return these?

[Laurent Gilson]

Hello,

>> If you have a radeon card, I've heard that whether or not you use the  
>> ATI fglrx drivers can make a difference.
>
> both radeon and fglrx drivers allow to set the X300 card into several  
> power consumption modes: rovclock / aticonfig.

Yes and no:
With the open-source radeon driver you can only modifiy the frequencies of  
the core and memory chip.

The closed-source driver shuts down parts of the chip (cuts them from  
power), modifies the core/mem-voltage and frequency. It's way more  
efficent to use closed-source.

>> I used to have the hd spin down after a few minutes. But it takes ages
>> to spin back up again, and I noticed these delays much more than any
>> battery time extension.
>
> Incidentally, spinning the hd down manually (hdparm -Y /dev/sda) works  
> fine, but spinning it back up again is impossible (basically my  
> filesystems become unreadable. The behaviour is  
> consistent/reproduceable). Does anyone else experience that?

Yes. -Y basicly tells the HD to stop working until hardreset happens (=  
reboot). -y tells the hd to spin down but come back if needed. -y works  
with thinkpads and most PCs, -Y only works for some very rare cases.

cu