OT: Major (25%) savings on Thinkpads (today only)

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Thu Aug 20 15:03:23 UTC 2009


On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 07:00:58PM -0400, Madison Kelly wrote:
> If I didn't have a dedicated game machine, I would agree completely.  
> However, I don't even let compiz run on my laptop. Whatever buys me more  
> coding time while on a battery...

Sure.  I just like dedicated video ram and such.  Nvidia makes pretty
power efficient chips these days.  The 105M isn't going to be impresive
for games either, but it beats the intel. :)

> Meh. I've got nothing on my laptop anyone would find very interesting...  
> Save for maybe my somewhat unhealthily large collection of mermaid  
> pictures. ;)

All it does is save you typing your password.  It doesn't make it more
secure really.  Just convinient.

> Foo. Oh well, like I said to Jamon, I didn't have a lot of time to  
> research it and it was $50... Maybe I'll find a creative way to use  
> it... if I can access it at all.

Who knows.  It is only 2GB.  A 2GB SD card in a card reader might be
just as useful and a lot cheaper.

> Apparently not on this model... They went out of their way to make it as  
> small as possible.

Well the SL500 I have is anything but small.

> Woots! Another spur-of-the-moment upgrade... I think it was ~$20 over  
> the 5100. I'm ashamed to say I don't even know the difference. ^_^;

Both the 5100 and 5300 have amazingly good linux support.  The 5300 can
do faster speeds on 802.11n than the 5100, but that's the only difference.
The non-intel option on the other hand tends to be a major pain in linux.

>> I have managed to tweak the settings on my SL500 down to about 17W idle.
>> A small tweak to knotify reduced it by 2.5W by allowing the audio chip
>> to go the sleep when nothing was playing (knotify currently keeps the
>> audio device open after using it forever preventing sleep mode).
>
> Oooh, did you keep notes?

Yeah I know what I did.  Play with 'powertop' and do what it suggests,
then add the module option to enable sleep mode for the audio chip when
not in use (saves about 2.5W for some reason).  The knotify changes was
to remove the '//' from two lines that were in the code but commented out.
For some reason someone thought it was better to keep one audio connection
open at all times rather than reopen it on demand, because clearly your
kde should be going bing at you all the time.

> Anything to improve battery life grabs my attention! :)

Well I currently get about 2.5 hours with the brightness turned down a
bit (and I don't have the LED backlight) on my SL500 with a 6cell battery.

That is with SATA link power management enabled, USB power management
enabled, low screen brightness, ext3 commit timer increased to something
like 30s rather than the default 5s (as powertop recommended), kernel
with NO_HZ enabled (powertop clearly shows how many wakeups your
system is getting and who causes them, which is how I found the audio
chip/knotify issue), cpu running at 800MHz (automaticly managed by the
frequency stuff).

-- 
Len Sorensen
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