Laptop batteries generally don't last more than 2-3 years and when they die they do take forever to charge and frequently won't EVER charge fully. Don't try recharging them you are just stressing the charging circuitry. Order a replacement battery from amazon or ebay
The only 2 Linuxes that do a good job with Broadcom wifi chips is the dd-wrt and fresh tomato alternative firmware for routers. But that's because the dd-wrt developer signed an NDA with Broadcom and used it to get the Broadcom binary blob driver2 working under Kernel version 3 while the Fresh Tomato developer's stuff is still on K2.6 and uses the Broadcom binary blob drivers available for that kernel. There used to be some schemes to emulate older kernels to run binary blob drivers under Unix, that were used for a while to get proprietary wifi chipsets to work. But I also think your biggest problem is that the Broadcom chipsets push a lot of work that should be done by the wifi chip onto the main CPU to save a few cents on silicon. That's fine if the CPU is superfast but otherwise it's baloney. Another option would be a USB wifi stick. But the internal cards are definitely better. Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <plug-boun...@lists.pdxlinux.org> On Behalf Of David Fleck Sent: Monday, September 23, 2024 4:55 PM To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <plug@lists.pdxlinux.org> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Slow (as in, really, really slow) wifi (was: Re: The neverending laptop recommendation request) I'm charging the battery up now. It's taking an insanely long time, it's been plugged in and turned off for about 24 hours now and the system reports it's 4% charged. -- - David Fleck On Monday, September 23rd, 2024 at 7:58 AM, Richard Owlett <rowl...@access.net> wrote: > On 09/23/2024 07:51 AM, David Fleck wrote: > > > So far, my laptop quest has lead me to an HP EliteBook 8560p cast off by my > > employer. So, yay, free! > > > > Installed OpenSuse Leap 15.6, everything seems to just work, except: > > battery is dead (easily fixed) and the wifi is molasses-in-January slow, as > > in 2 orders of magnitude slower than other laptops in the house. > > > Try again after battery has come up to full charge. > IIRC I once had an over-protective BIOS which slowed selected items > when battery was charging. > YMMV > > > Before I pick up a USB wifi adapter, can anyone give me some ideas w.r.t. > > troubleshooting why the onboard adapter is so slow? It's been many years > > since I had to mess around with tweaking network interfaces, so I've > > forgotten most of what is involved. > > > > Thanks- > > > > -- > > - David Fleck
