mistertdc
March 27th, 2013, 01:27 AM
Hi,
I've recently got a small "ultrabook-style" samsung laptop ("series 5" with AMD a6 Vision APU type of CPU:Graphics - A6 4455M CPU, it is a 2.1ghz dual core CPU) which had Win7 pre-installed. Battery life is just over 3.5 hours (basic wifi / internet browsing / web page use, brightness mid-level for screen, using pre-configured 'samsung eco mode' power profile in Win7).
I installed Xubuntu 12.10 / 64bit (I've got 6 gb ram on this thing hence 64bit OS pick) - (dual booting, kept windows around for now) - and everything installs very smoothly - all hardware (sound:video:network:wifi) works out of the box without issue. But my battery life is pretty horrible - 1.5 hours if I am lucky. I note that the laptop physically runs hotter, the fans are louder, and I get the feeling power management / resource throttling is simply not working as well.
I installed "Jupiter" power management tools; made sure cpufreq is installed (I'm not convinced it is doing much); and so far .. no real change that I can see. According to /proc/cpuinfo - the mhz is being dropped from high (2100mhz) to low (1300mhz) after a while / when things are not 'super busy' on the laptop.
Google searches find about a million different articles and suggestions, spanning approximately 10 years; and a bunch of various ubuntu versions. I understand that the more recent ubuntu is meant to be better at this than earlier ones but .. I am uncertain, maybe there is something required to configure 'laptop mode' which is not immediately obvious.
Are there any moderately straightforward steps that can be taken to address this? I'm happy to install, customize - as required - but I simply am having trouble finding what else can be done; and this seems like such a major issue that I'm hoping there are some pointers on how to make AMD APU based laptops work a bit better for power consumption.
(As a side note: "Suspend" seems to work poorly - also maybe power related - in the sense, I can suspend the machine, but when it 'wakes up' - I just get a blank screen and have to give up and power off hard eventually .. then reboot, and so forth. This kind of stinks, also, but is slightly less concern out of the gate than the battery life issue).
Any comments / thoughts / pointers are greatly appreciated.
Many thanks!
Tim
I've recently got a small "ultrabook-style" samsung laptop ("series 5" with AMD a6 Vision APU type of CPU:Graphics - A6 4455M CPU, it is a 2.1ghz dual core CPU) which had Win7 pre-installed. Battery life is just over 3.5 hours (basic wifi / internet browsing / web page use, brightness mid-level for screen, using pre-configured 'samsung eco mode' power profile in Win7).
I installed Xubuntu 12.10 / 64bit (I've got 6 gb ram on this thing hence 64bit OS pick) - (dual booting, kept windows around for now) - and everything installs very smoothly - all hardware (sound:video:network:wifi) works out of the box without issue. But my battery life is pretty horrible - 1.5 hours if I am lucky. I note that the laptop physically runs hotter, the fans are louder, and I get the feeling power management / resource throttling is simply not working as well.
I installed "Jupiter" power management tools; made sure cpufreq is installed (I'm not convinced it is doing much); and so far .. no real change that I can see. According to /proc/cpuinfo - the mhz is being dropped from high (2100mhz) to low (1300mhz) after a while / when things are not 'super busy' on the laptop.
Google searches find about a million different articles and suggestions, spanning approximately 10 years; and a bunch of various ubuntu versions. I understand that the more recent ubuntu is meant to be better at this than earlier ones but .. I am uncertain, maybe there is something required to configure 'laptop mode' which is not immediately obvious.
Are there any moderately straightforward steps that can be taken to address this? I'm happy to install, customize - as required - but I simply am having trouble finding what else can be done; and this seems like such a major issue that I'm hoping there are some pointers on how to make AMD APU based laptops work a bit better for power consumption.
(As a side note: "Suspend" seems to work poorly - also maybe power related - in the sense, I can suspend the machine, but when it 'wakes up' - I just get a blank screen and have to give up and power off hard eventually .. then reboot, and so forth. This kind of stinks, also, but is slightly less concern out of the gate than the battery life issue).
Any comments / thoughts / pointers are greatly appreciated.
Many thanks!
Tim