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

[Ari El]

I have an X60s (1702, Core Duo (not core2)) with and 8-cell battery pack.

What I'd say is: the bad experience on the X60s is with Linux. The machine
itself is awesome.

I've had it for a year and a half; with WinXP it is really fast for most
purposes, runs cold, and after all this time it is still giving me 8 to 9h
of battery life when used for writing (word) and light surfing (wireless
on), 30 or 40% brightness. Consumption averages an awesome 7.5W, and I've
seen it going to 6W with wireless off. It wakes up from hibernation in 15
seconds or so. And all this is with no SSD drive... yet!

I installed dual-boot Linux in the x60s the day I bought it, and kept
re-installing all new ubuntu releases. Everything basically works (save for
the fingerprint reader, although I heard it is possible to make it work).
Even after tweaking, power consumption averages 10 to 11W for the same usage
pattern as above. 

I bought the machine to carry it around, so I'm still booting winxp on it. I
can't wait for the day linux will give me a comparable battery life. I
switched to linux in every other machine at the office and at home, but not
in my x60s, yet. 

I'm sure  powertop, the tickless kernel mode and other good work of intel
and other folks will eventually trickle down the chain and we will
eventually get there. I thought this was going to faster though. 




Nils Faerber wrote:
> 
> 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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