improving efficiency of laptop power

From: Mark (none_at_xxxyyy.com)
Date: 05/23/04 

Date: Sun, 23 May 2004 14:10:11 -0400

I've been looking at some techniques to improve power
usage on my laptop, maybe others here would like to see them

1. set noatime in the /etc/fstab file to reduce
  assessing the disk (when it might be spun down) just
  to set the access time for read for files
2. lengthen the times between journalings for ext3
   (laptop_mode script does this inside it)
3. reduce the verbosity of logging done by daemons
  (I think the /var/log/messages file would be good to
   reduce the logging to, it seems to log rather unnecessary
  stuff sometimes like minor pppd events and 'su' events,
  "can't find module XYZ" when that's not a big deal
  because XYZ is some non-required module...
  so I put in /etc/syslog.conf for /var/log/messages
  to only log critical level or worse):
  *.crit;mail.none;news.none;authpriv.none;cron.none /var/log/messages
  from what it was (info level):
  *.info;mail.none;news.none;authpriv.none;cron.none /var/log/messages

I've looked at my other /var/log files, they don't change often
anyway.

4. use "laptop_mode start" to use the new laptop_mode script.
Now I notice here the guy that wrote the laptop-mode.txt readme
file says "if you can't afford to lose 10 minutes of work then
don't use it.." (as in laptop_mode). It then occured to me, why
do we assume you can only save to a hard disk? I suggest people
go get a nice USB key drive like a SanDisk Cruzer and do your
document saves to that on your laptop. With no moving parts
the USB Key drives use nearly no power. When you get it done
do a copy from the key to the hard disk for archiving it.
Then you can crank up your laptop_mode (or even increase the timeout higher
than 10mins) and not worry. BTW, I just found this kernelhq.org kernel
browser for the kernel source code, I highly recommend it. It allowed me to
read about laptop-mode without having the latest kernel yet.

ps. please followup this post with other useful ways to save power!
I'd guess dimming the laptop display if it's too bright would
be proprietary on each laptop? I see on my Thinkpad T41 you can
modify the default brightness in windows so there must be
some exposure to hardware for the brightness.

Mark

Relevant Pages

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    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
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    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
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