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

[Paul RIVIER]

Hi there,

>
>If you have a radeon card, I've heard that whether or not you use the
>ATI fglrx drivers can make a difference. They're supposed to support
>power saving features of the chipset... would be interesting if
>someone could confirm that.
>  
>
ati free friver handle most of it using the dynamicClock option.
here, a T42 9 cells on which I work mostly in emacs compiling sometime 
(not more than 1% of the time I believe so it is almost neglectable).
I can use it for more than 5 hours without wifi.
I can use it for 4 hours with wifi.
I can use it 3 hours with web browsing and high backlight intensity.

paul@ubuT42:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT*/info
present:                 yes
design capacity:         47520 mWh
last full capacity:      41910 mWh
(...)
battery type:            LION
OEM info:                SANYO
-----------------------------------------------------
present:                 yes
design capacity:         23760 mWh
last full capacity:      16780 mWh
(...)
battery type:            LiP
OEM info:                SANYO

(As you can see my ultrabay battery lost 30% of its capacity in 9 
months. Do you think I can get it replaced ?)

By the way I can I get such a long battery life though ?
1) CPU frequency control
2) GPU frequency control (using ati free driver, look in thinkwiki for 
DynamicClock)
3) Wifi throtlling (see man iwconfig)
4) No external mouse (2 Watts)
5) undervolting (this one is slightly tricky but very effective)
6) *desactivating* every single useless and heavy process. Enter "top" 
in a term and find if all stuff running using CPU are compulsory.
7) Sometime laptop-mode but the bad comfort resulting is not really 
worth the power saving I think.
-----> Basically same performance resulting but half the power consumption

If you do so and still require more than 12 watts when doing nothing, 
there is a problem.
 you can have a look at :
 cat /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal
temperatures:   35 35 27 38 25 21 19 19

And find out wich component generates heat. You can compare with my 
figures, there are stable.

regards


Paul