Notebook Battery...

[James Golick]

I realize that this is somewhat off-topic, but I just had a very
interesting experience with my notebook that I wanted to share.

My notebook is a compaq r3000 (3160 to be exact).  Prior to today, I
have never experienced very good battery life.  Particularly in linux
(ubuntu hoary, 2.6.11-custom), I sufferred extremely short charges.  I
would get MAX 2hours, and often much shorter than that, when
performing processor-intensive tasks.  In windows, it lasted slightly
longer, but still, performance was extremely poor.

I have a long bus ride ahead of me tonight, and I wanted to get the
best charge possible.  So during a meeting today, I left my computer
unplugged.  Then when I got home, I turned it on, also unplugged. 
After about 2 hours, the battery was at about 6%, but I turned off the
auto-hibernate, so that I could drain the battery a little more before
charging it.

Well, the battery lasted almost another two full hours on 0%.  I was
working (eclipse/firefox/apache/mySQL/php5 were running, as well as
GAIM...my 802.11g card was active, and transferring).   I have NEVER
gotten this kind of performance out of my battery...and it seems now
that this is all because of hte auto-hibernate feature I had had
enabled.  Does this mean that the major limitation to this battery is
the battery meter?  Its definitely not a problem with linux-acpi,
since I experience the same trouble with windows.

Needless to say, I'm turning auto-hibernate off, saving alot, and
watching carefully around 2% and down now.

Anybody else had this experience?

James
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