[TriLUG] Dear lazyweb^WTriLUG, Laptop suggestions?

[Daniel Sterling]

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 3:43 PM, Alan Porter <porter at trilug.org> wrote:
> On that Dell, I am convinced that most of the power goes to the built-in
> hair dryer that continuously blows hot air out of the side.

I have a 2010 MacBook Air, and I find it gets unreasonably hot unless
I install and run Fan Control
(http://code.google.com/p/fan-control-modded/) to keep the fans going
constantly. That does have an impact on battery life, but it'll still
run for a couple hours; with a new battery about 3 hours.

For linux, you can get quite an improvement on battery life by
reducing the max CPU speed and tweaking some proc settings. Here's a
script I use on a Thinkpad with an Intel CPU:

$ cat powersave
sudo pm-powersave true # ubuntu-specific?
echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save
echo 5 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
for i in /sys/devices/system/cpu/*/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq; do echo
1599000 | sudo tee $i; done # CPU-specific setting, check
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies and
choose the one about 3-4 notches from the bottom

You can also run Intel's powertop tool to tweak additional settings
for better battery life. With the above I get a good boost in battery
life on my Thinkpad.

-- Dan