I decided to compare the battery life in one laptop (LG LS50a) with
dual-boot: SuSE 9.3 and Windows XP.
Scenario on both operating systems:
- LCD at minimum brightness
- Screensaver switched off
- Suspend to RAM/Suspend to Disk switched off
- No activity whatsoever. The laptop is left with no user interaction
till the battery is discharged.
- No USB devices connected
Relevant hardware:
- Pentium M 1.6 Ghz
- ATI Mobility Radeon 9200
SuSE Power Management configuration:
- Powersave scheme:
- Frequency Scaling (Maximum Energy Saving)
- Allow Throttling (90% Max)
- Hard Disk Agressive Power Saving and Maximally Quiet
- Cooling Policy: Passive
Battery Life on SuSE: 3h50
Battery Life on Windows: 5h30
I was so surprised by this difference that I decided to repeat the test on
SuSE, this time switching the wireless card completely (unloaded the
module) and increasing the HD_MAX_AGE to 1800. The improvement in battery
life was just 10 minutes...
Frequency scaling seems to be working fine since the CPU Mhz is always 600.
And the hard disk actually spins down.
So does anyone have an explanation for this huge battery life difference?
Mark
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