Re: updatedb+checksecurity are killing my battery
Laurent de Segur wrote:
I am trying to minimize the power consumption of my laptop...
[on reducing hd usage]
The first one is updatedb which I moved from daily to weekly.
If you rarely add packages to your machine, you might consider
moving it from weekly to monthly or even take it off cron and
do it manually at your convenience.
End result: I get longer battery life. However, there is probably
something I missed that could help more in this direction. I would
appreciate if people on the list could post more hints in order to get more
juice off the hook. Thanks in advance,
You could try turning off VM (swapoff -a or something like that) if
you have enough memory (at least 64 MB) that you don't really need
swap-space. I find that even with X running, it takes quite a bit
of effort for a single user at a console to use up 64 MB---you need
to run some really big jobs. That gives you a good chance at
spinning down the hard disc.
Of course, if you want to turn off VM, you may also want to
recompile your kernel and compile just about everything you can
(except possibly sound and modules that the sound module requires)
as modules, allowing for extra memory savings.
There are the usual tricks of making sure that your networking,
modem, etc are off (I think they are turned off by default anyway)
when they are not in use, and if you really really don't need the
computing power, try turning the CPU cache off, and if it is an
option, turn down the CPU speed (at least one iBook---the 466 MHz
firewire---could do this). Turning down the screen brightness is
probably not advisable beyond a small percentage as it may affect
the life of the backlight.
Cheers,
Kin Hoong
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