Battery+OS question.

Vikings

Ok, my laptop is running XP at the moment and it only gets about an hours battery life (thank you very much 12 months running off mains with battery in).

My question is, if I was to put linux on the laptop would it be less demanding than XP and thus increase battery life?

Thanks in advance.

munzab

i wouldnt think so. i dont think linux has a speedstep thingy, if not ud get less battery time.... im not sure, but i guess IT techs will help you out more here

rsynnott

munzab wrote:

i wouldnt think so. i dont think linux has a speedstep thingy, if not ud get less battery time.... im not sure, but i guess IT techs will help you out more here

Linux supports the AMD and Intel speedstep thingies,. It's not dramatically less demanding than Windows, tho.

fatherdougalmag

Whatever you do, don't plump for one of these.

L1011

IncredibleBulk wrote:

Ok, my laptop is running XP at the moment and it only gets about an hours battery life (thank you very much 12 months running off mains with battery in).

My question is, if I was to put linux on the laptop would it be less demanding than XP and thus increase battery life?

Thanks in advance.

Linux is generally *more* demanding than XP

My Vaio has userland cpufreq working dynamically, and it spends most of its time at 100% (1.2Ghz) and very little time at 75%. Only drops down if its idling; and it also doesn't dim the backlight. It does park the disk though, which as its a 5400RPM, uses quite a bit of power...

XP did (its gone now...) extract a good 30mins more from the battery.

rsynnott

fatherdougalmag wrote:

Whatever you do, don't plump for one of these.

Gah, that review isn't hard enough on the scammers. See http://dansdata.com/batterylife.htm for a more cynical one. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence