[ltp] X60 - (bad) experience, others?

[Nils Faerber]

Hi!
Finally after now almost half a year of experience with a X60 I thought
I should share my not so good exerience here. Probably it is all my fault?
I used to have a X31 with which I was completely satisfied until it
broke :( It had a decent battery life and kept being cool! The fan was
almost never spinning (at least not until I did bigger compile jobs). It
was great.

Not so the X60.

The standard battery that comes with it only lasts for 1.5h to max. 3h,
but 3h means almost no CPU activity, backlight at lowest possible
setting (almost unreadable) or off and all wireless turned off. If it
shall be halfway usable the maximum I can get is 2.5h. Disappointing for
a modern expensive mobile hardware - compare this to e.g. Apple's notebooks.

The EC default settings concerning charging threshold promised battery
wear-out within the first year: Recharge threshold 95%, great idea :(
Well, this was easy to lower to more reasonable 80% using SMAPI.

The whole device is always quite warm, especially the region below the
right handrest - I suspect that WiFi is sitting there because it gets
even warmer when power saving on WiFi is not enabled or if it is used
more intensively.

The warmth also results in an ever spinning fan which is additionally
also quite noisier than the ones in X23, X24 or X31 (which were almost
inaudible at their lowest speed).

The situation with Wifi drivers is not improving over the last 1/2 year.
There is the IPW3945 driver which works quite fine but requires non open
source parts and is difficult to install. The newer open source IWL3945
does not work well (I have issues associating to APs) and I have the
impression that its power saving is not that good too resulting in even
less battery life. And since the release of 2.6.24 neither IPW nor IWL
compile out of the box - heck, what's going on there? IPW will not get
updated and there are third party projects to patch the latest IWL
drivers for 2.6.24 - the IWL driver in the stock kernel 2.6.24 is at
least three months old.

And while we are talking about 2.6.24 instead of getting better battery
performance that was rumored to come with cpuidle I get up to 4W of
battery drain - additionally. The lowest I can get with dim backlight
and no Wifi on 2.6.22 is about 9.5W - with 2.6.24 it is about 13.5W. I
found, using powerop, that one of the reasons might be that 2.6.22
manages to keep the idle CPU in C3 for 95% of the time while 2.6.24 C3
is only used for maybe 20-30%.

I hate to say it but I am not really satisfied with the device and if I
would have a choice I would buy a used X31 instead of the X60. But at
the time I bought it I had no choice and sellig it now would mean a very
high loss - so I have to stick with it.

But there is also light ;) The CPU performance is quite nice! Big
compile jobs just fly by. But this is not my most used use-case -
especially for a sub-notebook.
When do you use a sub-notebook most? Hm?
When you are travelling or at least when you are on-the-go. And this is
exactly where you usually do not have power plugs around so my most
important feature request is a decent battery life - way before high CPU
throughput.
Intel (I am tempted to say "crap")... when does Intel finally learn how
to design low-power CPUs and chipsets without letting the software do
all the work of power saving? Why does an Intel Wifi chipset get *hot*
while most other modern 54MBit chipsets only get hand-warm? Why does it
seem to be impossible to get a possively cooled Intel CPU (modern mobile
CPUs, not older ones).
When I was at OLS last year the most important feature request of Intel
people there was thermal management in the kernel - for sure, because
their hardware is always over-heating! They presented a prototype
hardware in the form factor of a PDA with their newest and latest
low-power mobile CPU - wow. Guess what, it had a fan! Sorry, but this
cannot be honestly state of the art in low power CPU design. Anything
above passive cooling in a modern mobile device is IMHO a design fault
(and while I am bashing Intel: The famous Asus EeePC also uses an Intel
low power mobile ULV CPU. Even at 150MHz, the lowest it can get, it
needs a fan for cooling! What a ....)

Oh well...
If you feel you have a great tip to save power and/or prevent heat
dissipation on the X60 I would be glad if we could share those tips here ;)

Cheers
  nils faerber

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