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0 pointstakno10y ago0 comments

My laptops at least for the past 5 years have been fine with Ubuntu - much the same battery life as windows, and with a little tweaking quite a lot longer. I'm currently getting 7 hours out a commodity Asus with a couple of dev environments and a VM running. It drops to 5 if I'm running the fairly intensive service I'm developing, 4 if I do anything foolish like run the service from within eclipse, and 3 if I leave the chat sidebar visible in Facebook

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criddell10y ago· 2 in thread

> I'm currently getting 7 hours out a commodity Asus with a couple of dev environments and a VM running

Wow, that's very good. I've always found running a VW absolutely destroys battery life.

For laptops, I've only ever managed to get 9+ hours on a Macbook and that's pretty much the threshold that I'm comfortable with to leave with a laptop as my work machine for the day. If you're getting 7+ on your Asus running a VM, you have to be over 9 without the VM running, right?

I'm going to load 16.04 on my ThinkPad and see how it does.

taknoOP10y ago

I'm actually not sure the VM is making that much difference, which is surprising, although it's pretty much only running nginx, and having all the bare-metal virtualization stuff enabled has helped a lot with performance.

This is with core-M, so in many ways the things to watch out for are screen brightness and anything which makes the processors ramp over 800mhz - that actually seems more damaging than processes that just wake a lot

criddell10y ago

Are you using the laptop mode tools or tlp? Any packages in particular that you would recommend to reduce power consumption?

BTW, my VM was running Windows and that's probably why it drained my batter so quickly.

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