Laptop battery runs short in FC6

[chocobanana]

Hey there

Here's the thing: I have a laptop running FC6 and the maximum battery duration I can get is 2:30 hours. In windows xp I can get 4:15 (in reality about 3:30) and in Suse 10.1 I could get about 3:30.

I'm running FC6 with the latest updates and among the hardware specs I have:
HP nx8220
P-M 1,73Ghz
Ati Mobility X600 with radeon open source drivers
Intel 2200b/g wireless
Bluetooth
Smartcard
SD slot
56k modem

I don't need any of the items below the Intel 8220 device. Is there a way to shut the rest down? I mean, the same way you can turn-off wireless, is it possible. Speaking of this, the wireless button has no effect in FC6 (it has in winxp and Suse 10.1)

I guess that by turning the mentioned devices and maybe something else I could get some extra juice...

Thanks a bunch

[Brian1]

Look into a tool called cpuspeed. I believe it slows the cpu down when not in heavy use. Unless a switch exist on the laptop for the wireless then I don't think it can be turned off persay. Only thought is unload the module that is used by the wireless card may work to turn it off.

Brian

[chocobanana]

I already have CPUFreq running. I think one problem might be the open source radeon drivers.

For the wireless button, I'd prefer to have it working. I'm also not sure if unloading the modules will shut the devices down...

Thanks

[THE Ralfinator]

Does your wireless work? My friend's wireless button used to not have any effect, but when i got the card running with ndiswrapper, the button was able to work again, just like it does in windows.

[ZeusZon]

Standby question for you:

Strangly I get an extra hour in FC6 over XP. 5h 45 compared to 4:45. When new was 6h 30.

But my system drains quite alot of battery on standby. 80% in the morning if I disconnect it the night before. XP used to drain near no power.

It doesn't seem to want to shutdown certain devices I presume.

Do you happen to have a standby battery drain probem aswell?

There are tools for XP. Which can tell you your discharge rate in watts. Maybe there is also a app for linux. If you find one. Try disabling certain devices. It might help you determine the largest drain on power as the wattage information drain will change as you enable and disable devices.

[chocobanana]

Ooops. I guess the wireless button works. But I thought it didn't, because the button's light won't turn on, it's always off. But I still can't get that great battery life I wanted...

ZeusZon, I cant put my computer to standby (you mean suspend to ram, right?), it crashes when trying to resume. Gnome-powermanager now has a discharge rate graph, but I can't see how can that be helpful, it doesn't point to any specific devices. I still think that the radeon drivers may be behind the power drain.

Does anyone knows how to add more agressive power saving setting to the radeon driver? I already have "DynamicClocks" "On" in my xorg.conf.

Thanks

[BigA]

My powersavings sofar:

With 1GB of RAM or more you dont need any SWAP, so article (check on the beginning for wm.swappiness).
So wm.swappiness=0 with enough RAM.

No swap, less disk activity, less space required, and IMPROVED PERFORMANCE.

In /etc/fstab I added the "noatime" attribute. When accessing a file, no last accessed time is written to file.

All off the unnessecery services are shut off.

Syslogd is shut off. For a user system, there is no need for logging.

Laptop-mode. None of these things wouldn't helped a lot if there was no laptop-mode. I'm not gonna explain what it does, couse my english is not that good, so read it for yourself.

Most of the time on my laptop I write or browse through the internet. So text gets saved on save button or when the laptop-mode takes action. As far as internet browsing goes, I noticed, when I go on a page, disk starts (write cache and page history). So what I did, I disabled the history and disk cache. So when I just browse the pages, the disk stays off, unless if the page has a cookie or a form, where I have saved username/password. <= For my use of laptop, it's a signifficant improve in powersave.

For CPU cpuspeed is used offcourse.

For graphics, I have ATI Radeon Mobility X700. I installed original ati drivers. The newer versions have now ATIPowerplay like in windows, to scale the gpu clock down when on battery. So when on battery, the gpu clock is at 1/3 of the full gpu speed.

And the last: for wireless i'm still testing if cutting down the TXpower on a 1/2 is bringing and improvement.

Sorry for my english.