Micha Feigin wrote:
What I can say is that, with my old Thinkpad 600 then running under RedHat 7.2, I could expect at least three hours of work with the battery, even three and a half hours when the battery was new (I used that thing for about 6-7 years, and this is my third battery). Even though I did have a small MSWIN partition (Windows 98), I have never used it long enough to evaluate how long my laptop would work on battery under that OS, but I doubt that it would have be 3X more, that is 9 to 10 hours.On Sun, 4 Jan 2009 15:05:31 +0100 Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.org> wrote:On 2009-01-04 11:28:10 -0200, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:And BTW, the ThinkPads will waste up to 3W more in Linux than in Windows, so keep that in mind when you look at battery life figures.Is there any reason? Is this specific to ThinkPads?From talks on linux-thinkpad it is not currently know exactly why, mostly speculations. Either more agresive throttling of the graphics chip and/or putting pci to sleep. Possibly more optimizations
This Thinkpad 600 was just a perfect machine. It ran at least 4 hours a day, often 6-8 hours daily for more than 5 years ; everything worked perfectly. I still have that machine, but then I was unable to get satisfactory results when it came to operate WiFi. With WEP encription it worked OK, but no workable issue with WPA. I then tried to install Debian Etch, which worked OK, but not with WPA. Also, using Debian Etch, a few utilities are not working properly, such as fan management and sleep and hibernation modes, which worked perfectly under RedHat 7.2, to the point that I rarely shutdown ; I just closed the lid. Under Debian Etch, the log messages say about fan and sleep management : "BIOS too old"... I bet I could overcome this, but I thought time might have come to get something newer, since that Thinkpad was only 300 MHz (Pentium 3) with a Hard Drive of 5 Gb. I then ordered a DELL Inspiron 1525, which I should receive tomorrow. This is an experiment, also a bet, with the advantage of a really low cost. It costs about as much as those new mini-computers or internet-computers, but this is a real machine. If it fails, I will take advantage of the warranty and services, and, in any case, that will be an experience. True enough : if I decide that it is a mistake, no warranty that good reliable computers such as Thinkpad T61 will then still be available...
I will let you know of my impressions when I receive that laptop. It is supposed to run on Ubuntu, but I wish to install Debian Lenny instead. Indeed, Ubuntu is probably OK, but I bet that it will include something like Gnome or KDE, and I am more at ease with fvwm. I hope that the removal of Ubuntu and replacing by Lenny will not genearate problems as far as managing fan, video, sleep and hibernation modes, or with WiFi capabilities with WPA encryption.