Thinkpad t500

[Guest]

Hi all everything is going good.

I was wondering the best battery power manager for the laptop. I right now seems like the battery drains fast and it is just idle. when it comes to power managing a laptop I am new at that. I seen posts for CPU frequency what does that mean? My t500 does not seem to have a ATI graphics card 3650 so that is not a issue.

thanks dave

[Teunis]

Yes there is such a thing as throttling the CPU (frequency) but that typically works fine by itself.

I would start by observing what is drawing power and then decide if it's worth or even possible to switch it off.

The two easiest applications are System monitor, it is already installed.
Have a look in the first tab with the process tables and see what's on top for CPU and memory usage.

Then install powertop and run in in Konsole with the command :

sudo powertop

This will show you in detail how much power is used by the various devices (hardware) and processes (software).

You can change the display with the Tab key.
The last option on the right allows you to 'tune' certain functions by switching them from status Good to Bad, see the hints at the bottom.

An easy one is switching off WIFI and Bluetooth, obviously only if you don't need them!

[Guest]

Many processes are using lots of ram

kwin 38,386K

Krunner 17,632K

Xorg 14,828K

kded4 52,572K seems it go up to 74,xxx

Kmix 16572K

I search the web for info on these and it seems it is know for Kruuner to have this issue but I can not turn them off.

I did however I turned ones that I could to good and mostly device like xd card slot. I use DS cards. Wifi is also good as it the audio see if it gains me any more batter minutes.

[Guest]

With powertop when I set to bad to good the setting does not last seems it reverts back to the default setting to bad. some of these listed I am sure one cannot manage the power on like PCI device. Would that not cause issues with the system function?

[Teunis]

RAM use has very little to do with power consumption,CPU does.

[Guest]

I need to see what was installed by the installation. It seems that with Kubuntu 14.04 on install it installed thermald along with pm-utilis. I install powertop and I used "sudo pm-powersave true" I am not really sure this did anything, I will have to time it an hour on the battery to see if the power lasts longer. My question is do i keep thermald installed or remove it, this will not cause any conflict to the power saving? I am not new to Linux but I never used it on a laptop this is new ground for me. I read all the info on the web right now it is overwhelming. Edit this config or that config gets very confusing. the above code "sudo pm-powersave true" is running what ever default files there is in pm-utilis. IF any have experience with thermald or powertop which is better or de=oes that depend on the laptop?