Laptop battery management tool?

[Theory5]

I have a tx2-1270us laptop, and its good for taking notes (now that i have ubuntu 9.04 on it). But my battery lasts about 2:05 hours and it bugs the heck outa me because that is about the length of one of my college classes. And I have two in a row each day. HP wants $139.00 for an 8-cell battery, which is huge, and cumbersome. I also know that we have the technology to make it much much smaller, but I belive its propriety information of Apple. My friend has a notebook that lasts 5 hours with an internal battery, and I heard they have 8 hour long batteries. When I am on windows with this it has a couple different management settings, which shut down parts of the computer i'm not using, or it gives them less power. Is there anything like that for ubuntu?

[freeztar]

Screens are by far the largest source of power suckage.

 

Go to System>Preferences>Power Management and you can tweak the settings for "battery power". Make sure the bottom two boxes are ticked.

 

Also, on my comp, I can hit Fn-F8 and it dims my screen way down. Doing this will greatly enhance your battery life if you have the option. If you don't have that option, then set the display to turn off after 1 minute in the battery power settings mentioned above. That way, if you are listening to a teacher's unimportant rant for five minutes, the screen will be off. When something important is said, you just start typing to activate the screen and it will stay active until you stop typing for one minute.

 

Try those tips and let me know how it goes. :hal_jackolantern:

[Theory5]

Thanks, but it doesnt help the battery a lot. I have been doing that.

[alexander]

cat /proc/cpuinfo for us please

 

also disable wifi and bluetooth if you have them on. turn off sound and use a frequency governor to scale your processor down as much as you can...

 

you wont get the same perfomance out of your laptop for battery time as a mac, just because of the capacity of mac batteries, that said, you can probably extend the life a bit though... and getting an 8 cell is a must...

[Theory5]

yroeth@Yroeth-laptop-Ubuntu:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor	: 0
vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
cpu family	: 17
model		: 3
model name	: AMD Turion(tm) X2 Dual-Core Mobile RM-75
stepping	: 1
cpu MHz		: 2200.000
cache size	: 512 KB
physical id	: 0
siblings	: 2
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 2
apicid		: 0
initial apicid	: 0
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 1
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch osvw skinit
bogomips	: 4399.86
TLB size	: 1024 4K pages
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps hwpstate

processor	: 1
vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
cpu family	: 17
model		: 3
model name	: AMD Turion(tm) X2 Dual-Core Mobile RM-75
stepping	: 1
cpu MHz		: 2200.000
cache size	: 512 KB
physical id	: 0
siblings	: 2
core id		: 1
cpu cores	: 2
apicid		: 1
initial apicid	: 1
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 1
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch osvw skinit
bogomips	: 4389.49
TLB size	: 1024 4K pages
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps hwpstate

Yea the 8-cell battery is $139.

HP® Official Store — Buy an HP 8-cell Extended-Life Battery for tx Series (SP08) (KC991AA) from HP

and it pretty much kills the tablet function of my laptop :-(

and the 6-cell is $129.00

and right now I am a college student so I have little money.

 

And I looked up lithium ion batteries, and then I went and looked up mac's new battery technology. And who developed lithium Ion anyways? they are cylindrical! not square! who thought that cylinders would be a good storage shape? Jeez. Im surprised nobody else thought about that. Then theres the internal battery thing, where the external lithiums have almost 1/4th an inch of plastic covering the battery! I mean, innovation my but, apparently Apple has the only design team that uses common sense in their computer designs.

[freeztar]

and the 6-cell is $129.00

and right now I am a college student so I have little money.

 

You know, back when I was in college we got by real cheap with a notebook (the paper kind) and a pencil. :)

[Theory5]

You know, back when I was in college we got by real cheap with a notebook (the paper kind) and a pencil. :D

 

 

I know I know Ive heard this one before gramps :D you had to walk to school every day. Twelve miles to the school-house and twelve miles back. Uphill both ways, even in blizzards...

hehe

you haven't seen my handwriting :-)

[alexander]

well your problem is that you dont have anything scaling that cpu down... 2.2 ghz is its normal operation... even my phenom x4 can be scaled to 1.2 ghz and your turion, if i'm not mistaken can go as low as 12% or maybe even lower...

 

try this

 

first lets see if acpi is running:

 

ls /proc/acpi

 

if it shows many things, its good, if not "dmesg | grep -i acpi" for us please

 

cat /proc/acpi/processor/P001/info

cat /proc/acpi/processor/P001/limit

cat /proc/acpi/processor/P001/power

cat /proc/acpi/processor/P001/throttling

 

for us please

 

and if all that works and the last command states multiple states, you can procede to set up manual frequency management.

 

You can manually manage your frequency (alternatively you can use a governor which will try to do it for you, or both). Add the applet located under "System & Hardware" called "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor" to your pannel.

 

then run

 

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

 

Read, agree, all that good stuff and then you'll have some frequencies available to control in the frequency scaling monitor gnome applet.

 

Also set up sensor and temperature monitoring

 

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors sensors-applet hddtemp

 

sudo sensors-detect

 

Say yes to all the annoying questions.

 

After rebooting, you should add "Hardware Sensors" applet (the same way you did frequency scaling)... This will allow you to monitor fan speeds, hard drive temperatures and other sensors the system might detect

 

That's a great processor by the way. I'm assuming that you ARE running ubuntu in 64 bit to use the most of it, right?

 

oh another thing is i dont know what you have going on for graphics, but if you use beryl, compiz and all that stuff, you might want to turn as much of that off as you can, when on battery :D

[Qfwfq]

you haven't seen my handwriting :-)

I was always lousy at taking notes. Girls are especially good at it. Quite often they were willing to let me copy theirs. :D

 

Also, back in that stone-age era, many uni students used a special rock called a "cassette recorder" (neolithic of course, a quite advanced artifact, so definitely not paleolithic). Of course they would pencil down what the dude chalked onto the board and didn't make audible. Often they pooled together and shared the task of converting voice to paper. Gosh what a backward world that was!

[GAHD]

YouTube - Laptop Battery Hack http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtqRvAu71Gw

 

Make your own.