[ltp] X200 Battery Life

[John Li]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 01:03:55AM +1030, Andrew Mason wrote:
> I've just recently bought an X200 with a 4 cell battery.... I was
> just wondering if any of you managed to get near the 3hr battery
> life that lenovo said I should get under Linux. If so can you
> provide me with any hints. I've also set the bios to maximum
> battery.

Hey Andrew,

I have a X200 running Debian (Lenny, a 2.6.26 amd64 kernel). I got the
9 cell (84.2 Watt-hours), but here are what I've seen in terms of
power consumption.

On Windows Vista (32 bit, I believe), with the absolute lowest power
configuration I could get (no wifi, lowest brightness,
"BatteryStretch" settings enabled, no Aero, turning off Superfetch and
Windows Defender, idle system, etc.), a fully charged battery gets me
~14-15 hours. ~5-6 watts, I think.

On Linux, again with a lot of configurations (no wifi, lowest
brightness, almost all powertop suggestions, ondemand governor, no usb
modules, refresh rate set to 50hz, laptop-mode, etc.), 100% battery
life gets ~10-11 hours. ~8-9 watts.

ON Linux, with wifi on and medium brightness, with 70% I see 5.25
hours. ~10-11.5 watts.

I've spent a lot of time on http://lesswatts.org/ applying essentially
all of the tips and tricks. I primarily use minimalistic software (no
GNOME things, the most bloated app is Firefox with its blasted
futex_wait's).

Compared to Vista, Linux still trails behind by ~3 watts at idle.


Hope that helps a bit,
John