[ltp] Linux on T61 vs Linux on T400...

[Karsten König]

> My problems:
> 1. Earlier, the battery power indicator used to show more than 4 hours
> remaining for a 100% charged battery. Recently, I've noticed that it
> shows about 2.4 hours. There's no difference even after I switch off
> wireless, bluetooth etc. and reduce screen brightness. Is this a
> problem with the indicator, and if it is, what is a better tool to
> estimate battery power? If not, what might be the problem?

Powertop works good, also gives a rough power draw estimation etc pp., you 
should get the system with everything turned down/off (screen still on) to 12W 
easily. Also using tp_smapi will give alot of information about the battery, 
similar to the windows lenovo power manager, not that pretty though, but also 
not drawing that much power...

> 2. Not that I need to use it all the time, but when I enable Compiz
> Desktop effects, the computer reaction time seems to slow down. When a
> minimized application is selected, it pauses a while before coming to
> focus. When a song is playing, the song pauses too for a while, while
> Compiz is enabled and another window is brought to focus. I don't
> understand why this is happening. Also, while I play movies in VLC,
> after about every 15 minutes, the video freezes for a few seconds
> (like 5) and then continues afterwhile. This happens with every video.
> 
> Is it some problem with the video driver or something else?

The intel driver ubuntu 9.04 is using isn't the best as far as I heard 
(transition phase between two different driver "architectures" (switch to GEM 
and KMS, dropping of old rendering paths etc), if turning off compiz makes it 
behave just switch it off, you can propably live without it until intel fixed 
it.


> 3. How do I use the HDAPS module for hard-disk protection?

Check the thinkwiki about this, the documentation is good and extensive.