On Sun, 28 May 2006 18:59:46 -0500, Tracy Di Marco White
<netbsd@gendalia.org> wrote:

> I'm going to be spending the next week at a conference

Usenix?  I'll be there, too.  Any other NetBSDers planning to attend?

> and I know
> I won't always be able to be near an outlet.  A co-worker running
> one of those other OSs (his is from Redmond) with the same laptop
> can get nearly double the time out of his two batteries that I can.
> 
> What tips do people have for making your battery last as long as
> possible, when you want to use the computer?
> 
> I have an atheros wireless card, which I guess I can't do powersave
> with.  I have radeontools installed for shutting off the backlight,
> I have estd set up to adjust the CPU frequency down when I'm not on
> AC. I mount / (my only partition) with noatime, nodevmtime, and soft
> dependencies.

What is radeontools?  I don't see anything of that name in pkgsrc.  I turn
off my backlight via 'sleep 1;xset dpms force off'.
> 
> I've got a Latitude D600. I'm running a few days old current.
> 
Unfortunately, there's not much more you can do -- see port-i386/32973.
All of the fixes I've seen proposed appear to be buggy.

You're right; it's a major PITA.  I wish it were fixed.


		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb