[ltp] X200 Battery Life

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:08:42 -0400
John Li <jli@circularly.org> dijo:

> > I have to laugh. The first problem is that the display will be too dim
> > to read. But that won't really matter because I will have turned off
> > everything that makes the computer usable.
> > 
> > I don't mean to disparage what you say, because it is good to have a
> > list of culprits. It's just that for a lot of people (like me) it is
> > unrealistic. My mouse is bluetooth,
> 
> But you have a trackpoint! ;)

I am hopeless with anything but a real mouse. I disabled the touchpad
in the BIOS because when typing my fingers would inadvertently touch it
and suddenly I'd be typing in a different location in the document. But
I left the trackpoint enabled, although I use it only for those cases
where the bluetooth mouse dies and has to be reconnected. Otherwise, it
drives me crazy.

> > I need my USB flash drive,

> I don't know if USB is such a big deal still, if you enable the
> autosuspend. Still, if you don't /constantly/ need the drive plugged
> in, a script for loading/unloading USB modules is pretty short.

I have a T61 and its famous flaky USB ports. The ones on the back right
corner don't work worth a damn. And I bet if I disable USB I'll never
get it working again without a reboot. 

> > I need to get on the net and mostly the only way to do so is with
> > wireless, and my favorite browser is Firefox.
> 
> I believe Firefox has gotten better recently, because of powertop. If
> you have wifi enabled, the driver waking up every 100ms to process the
> AP beacons outweighs Firefox by quite a bit, at least on my system.

Well, I only responded because the list seemed ridiculous to me. But,
as Tino pointed out, the list is just for troubleshooting to see which
one(s) are the culprit(s). 

Having said that, my T61 gave me barely an hour with Gutsy x86_64, but
ever since the release of Hardy I have about two hours, usually a
little more than two hours. And that's with the screen on max
brightness and all the things in the list running. Hardy added a lot of
power management features. Also my video is nVidia, known to use a lot
more power than Intel or ATI; and there's nothing I can do about that.
But I am satisfied with the battery life I have. It is enough to get me
through the longest class (two hours), and I just bring my brick with
me if I'm going to need it more than that. I do sympathize with people
who don't have access to power mains for long periods of time -
travelers, for example.