Extend Battery Life on Laptop

[Member 3guesses]

Here is how I have managed to get almost 10 hours’ light use (basically word processing) out of my laptop when it was generally giving me 3-4 hours.

1. Switch off wi-fi when you don’t need it (possibly in the BIOS, physically disconnecting the card and/or using ConMan to power off devices)

2. Reduce screen brightness (via Control Centre->Hardware->Backlight Brightness) I have mine at ~25%, which is usable unless I’m outside in bright daylight

3. Set screen blanking (via Control Centre->Session->Set Screen Blanking) I have mine set at 1 minute

4. Manually turn the screen off when not needed (via command “xset dpms force off“) I have programmed the “switch display” function key (Fn + F10 on my laptop) to execute this command by editing ~/icewm/keys to include the line switchkey “Super+p” xset dpms force off

5. Don’t have any USB devices connected unnecessarily (including memory sticks)

6. Install antiX to a solid state storage device rather than a mechanical HDD (I have mine installed on a 128GB micro-SD card as I have the internal NVMe drive disconnected for reasons I won’t go into!)

Anyway, I hope one or more of those tips is helpful to someone.

[Member sybok]

Helpful

Up

0

::

Hi, there are some packages such as ‘tlp’ and ‘laptop-mode-tools’.
Using one of them may have its downsides, I believe that the latter used to turn off some not used HW ports/”devices” causing wi-fi issues.

[Member iznit]

Helpful

Up

1

::

tools to control frequency scaling of the CPU [[[managed CPU throttling]]]

package “cpufreqd” gives 2 utilities plus manpages: cpufreqd-get and cpufreqd-set
package “cpufrequtils” gives 3 utilities plus manpages: cpufreq-aperf and cpufreq-info and cpufreq-set

[Author]

Posts