Extending battery life

[attilathepun]

I searched the forums, and was amazed I didn't find a thread on this already

Anyway, how do I extend the battery life on my laptop? I get a solid 2 hours under Windows, and only about 1.25 - 1.5 hours on Linux, running Zenwalk on a Toshiba Satellite 3000-s353.

I do know some of the power-saving is controlled by the bios, like disabling the infrared and dimming the screen, but I know there are things the operating system can do (my apologies, this is coming from a long-time Windows tech who fairly recently made the switch to Linux), such as disabling plug-and-play and hotplug (so they're not pinging device hosts) and shortening the drive shutoff times.

[burntfuse]

I think GNOME 2.16 has a pretty nice power management tool which lets you tune stuff like that, and even shows a graph of power use over time. See this link. If you want to do it from the command line instead, you can adjust hard drive parameters with hdparm (not sure about the others).

[attilathepun]

Hmm, that seems like a mighty fine utility

I'd rather not run Gnome, though, since it's a 900Mhz P3 with 256Mb ram, and I want all the horsepower I can squeeze out. I'll look up hdparm tweaks, and some command-line cpu governing tools. The more I look, the more I find -- wmpower off of sourceforge looks promising, too.

Again, I was amazed I couldn't find anything on this already in the forums. Maybe in a few months after I've experimented with a number of different solutions I can write a how-to guide

[Zelmo]

That'd be swell. I've noticed that I don't get very good battery life under Linux, but just never bothered to look into it because I seldom run on battery power. If you can make a good guide, that'd be a great contribution to the Linux community!

[burntfuse]

Definitely, I've got a laptop too and I'd like to see what you find.

[weknowtheworld]

Here's How:

Use the correct recharging procedure for your laptop. Only use the power cord that came with your laptop or an authorized replacement.
Follow correct maintenance for your battery when not in use. Don't leave it in direct sunlight, areas where it will be exposed to extreme temperatures such as car trunks.
Use your laptop's power management features. The system will run at lower processor speeds when enabling power management features and it will go into "sleep" mode faster when inactive.
Buy batteries with internal processors such as Li-Ion batteries.
Non Li-Ion batteries must be fully discharged and then recharged every 2-3 weeks.
If you don't use your laptop for a period of time, you must fully discharge then recharge the battery

[burntfuse]

That's for all laptops, but he was talking about controlling power use from software (like the power-down time for hard drives).