[Gllug] Centrino and Linux APM

[Christopher Hunter]

On Saturday 07 Feb 2004 12:50 am, Garry Heaton wrote:
> I wish to buy a PC laptop which will give me maximum battery life while
> running Linux. While the Centrinos have been heavily hyped in the last 12
> months can anyone say whether they noticably extend the battery life under
> a recent Linux distro (Red Hat Fedora Core/Mandrake 9.2) with APM or is
> this benefit an exclusively Wintel phenomenon.
>
> Second question: does running a laptop in console moode significantly
> increase battery life compared with, say, KDE running only a terminal plus
> Mozilla. Any examples from real-life usage welcome.

My (brief) experience with both Pentium 3 mobile against Centrino is that the 
Centrino definately makes a difference - power consumption is substantially 
reduced, but so is speed!  Battery life on the Centrino laptop was about 5 
hours, and on the P III M about 2 hours.  

Apart from the processors and associated glue, there was little difference in 
the hardware.  I ran both Mandrake and Win XP on both machines, and saw no 
difference in battery life under either.  The thing that really hammered the 
battery was when watching a film or listening to a CD - both machines were 
equipped with DVD drives - and running the drive continuously almost halved 
battery life.

The Centrino-based machine was sent back under warranty, as it failed in use 
after three weeks due to an intermittant mobo fault.  The P III M is still 
going strong after a couple of years of heavy use, which suggests that the 
build quality of recent laptops isn't as good as older ones!

Chris

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