Hardware :: Using A Compact Flash Card As A Hard Drive Improve Battery Life?
Aug 30, 2010
I am wanting to replace the hard drive on my laptop with a Compact Flash Card. I bought a card and a adapter, but I am seeing that there are a lot of downsides to this (e.g. the card is slower, writes should be conserved because of limited write cycles, etc..) plus, in order to change the hard drive in my laptop (ibook g3 clamshell) you literally have to disassemble the entire thing! I mainly wanted to do this project to increase my battery life. However, some people say that it doesn't make much of a difference, while others say it is wonderful. So, to those that have done this mod, how much of a difference did it make for you?
View 1 Replies
ADVERTISEMENT
Jun 16, 2010
My battery life in Ubuntu is much less than that of Windows 7. I am trying to find ways to improve my battery life in Ubuntu. One thing that I notice is that my CPU (Intel Core i7 on a Lenovo Thinkpad W510) always runs at 55 degrees Celsius or even higher. my GPU right now reads 51. Seems pretty toasty to me, but not too over the top. Is it abnormal to have this as an average temperature? (since writing, it has risen to 57. I am on AC power, listening to music with Rhythmbox and browsing the web in Google Chrome.)
My cpu mode is set to 'ondemand', and I think this is a good option to balance power and speed. I am wondering if there is a similar function for the gpu. In my Nvidia settings my "PowerMizer" preferred mode is set to adaptive. Is that essentially all the improvement I'm going to get? In windows it seems like the amount of heat coming from the fan corresponds to running cpu/gpu intensive programs. When I'm not doing much, the exhaust is not as hot. In Ubuntu 10.04, the stream of heat is relatively constant. It does increase with more use, but it seems that the base temperature is higher.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Feb 24, 2011
So I've been using Ubuntu on a Toshiba L645d, and after a few hiccups with the sound and wireless, it's finally working well now. However, the battery is still a bit less when compared to Windows 7 (2:00 vs 2:35, but it came with optimizations on W7 so that might be the reason. A comparison of power used: 25w of power on Ubuntu vs 17.5 on W7.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Feb 8, 2010
I'm trying to install Ubuntu 9.10 to a Compact Flash card. It's not going very well. I have a 4GB USB drive that I want to install from. I can boot from this USB drive and get into either Ubuntu itself or the installation program only. Either way, I've tried to install it.
My Sandisk Extreme IV 4GB 45MB/s compact flash card is detected in my BIOS and shows up during the installation as well. Whenever I try to finalize and start the installation it gets to 15% and then gives an error on how it can't mount the file system.
I've tried every file system available. Funny thing is, I can use gparted to format the card to ext2. It then shows up on the desktop as a drive. If I go into that drive, there's a folder called lost+found. If I try to enter that folder it complains about permissions.
Is there any special trick to installing onto a compact flash card? I've tried with every file system available, with and without a swap file partition as well. I have quite scarce experience with Ubuntu and Linux in general so this is incredibly hard. But I wont give up that easily!
Second thought: If I can't get this working, would it be just as OK to run it as a "live" distro on the CF card? The motherboard is an Intel D945GSEJT. Using 1 gig ram.
View 4 Replies
View Related
May 29, 2010
I have a project were I have been trying to use Compact Flash (CF Card) was a Ubuntu system drive, but can't seem to successful partition it. I can partition without error, but I go back into the partition tool it gives usually a cryptic error about the partitions. They won't format either. For example Gparted puts orange triangles next to each partition. cfdisk says partition exceeds cylinder boundary. I've tried three different computer, two different CF to IDE adapters (a laptop and desktop type) and four different models/brands of CF cards all are supposed to fixed disk IDE compatible. My theory is the drive geometry is not being detected correctly, or maybe a sector alignment issue. I've tried GUID partitions too and it doesn't help. How do I correctly partition a CF card?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Aug 24, 2011
I have a bootable Linux compact flash card and want to copy it to an SD card. What would be the easiest way to do this?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Sep 30, 2009
I have a system with Voyage-Linux (Debian based) as my OS running on a compact flash card. Some files appear to be corrupt on it. Whenever I do a ls,cp,mv,rm command on these files I get the message Stale NFS file handle. I actually had the problem on 2 identical systems. I fixed the first one by attaching the CF card to another linux system and then running e2fsck -f -v /dev/sdb1. It got rid of the bad file.
My problem is I won't be able to do that all the time. I'm gonna have several of these systems in different places and won't have direct access to them, therefore I'm looking for a solution that would work on the system itself. Now running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem seems to be a bad idea from what I read, but I tried anyway and it did not get rid of the file. I tried running tune2fs -c 1 /dev/hda1 and rebooting, which is supposed to run e2fsck after the next boot (not 100% sure here) but that didn't seem to work.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Mar 2, 2010
getting back to our laptop, the stability window is ~3.2V. Meaning that when you operate the battery above this the electrolyte is oxidized on the positive electrode and reduced on the negative electrode. Remember that we only want to oxidize and reduce the active materials and don't want to do anything else. All these reactions other than the ones we want are called side reactions and these are really bad for the battery. The nominal voltage of a laptop battery is 3.7 V which means that something bad wants to happen as we use the battery.So long story short, stuff (e.g., passive layers and poor kinetics of reactions) happens and things are not as bad as they seem and you can increase the voltage up to 4.2V without bad things really happening. All chargers for Li-ion cells today cut the battery off when it reaches 4.2V. What you have to realize is that at 4.2V, these side reactions are present in finite amounts and start to chemically kill the battery, but its not that dramatic.
Operating to 4.1V makes things better and extends the life, 4.0 V is even better and so on. So why don't battery manufacturers cut the voltage off at, say, 4 V to get better battery life? Because every time you cut this voltage down you decrease the capacity of the battery and its run time. The 4.2V cutoff is a compromise between good run time and decent (read "not pathetic) life.On the other hand, if you charge the battery and then pull the plug (so to speak), the battery discharges some, the voltage drops, and these reactions become less of a problem and your battery life goes up. So the best things you can do is to charge the laptop (or cell phone, camera etc.) and once its charged, pull the plug. Your battery will thank you for it.As a matter of fact, if you own a Lenovo Thinkpad, you can actually change the state of charge to which you charge the battery using the Battery Maintenance utility. You can change this from charging to 100% state (where the voltage is 4.2V) to 90% so that your voltage is less. You lose some energy is doing that, but atleast you can change it to 100% when you need battery power and put it back down to 90% when you can plug in. I wish my Mac has the same feature.
I typically use the battery for a while (say 1/2 hour to 1 hour), then plug it in and wait to fully charge it, then I pull the plug and use it again for 1/2 hour to 1h and then I repeat this. Takes some getting used to and I forget to do this, but I try.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Oct 16, 2010
still would like to see some actual LAB DATA - but the info here is satisfactory as a "general rule of thumb". I was wondering if I put files on a USB flash drive & left it sit on the shelf, how long it would be before those files would start to deteriorate? - This would have nothing to do with the read/write cycle as in the "shelf time" it wouldn't be used.
View 14 Replies
View Related
Jun 3, 2010
I'm using xubuntu on a box that has 2 drives. One is quite small mounted as / and the other larger drive is mounted as /home Both drives are IDE The /home drive has had some failure in the past & occasionally creates errors. Is there any way of identify which sectors are bad (or good) and isolating them to try & get some more use out of the drive?
It won't be used for storing valuable data.It is an old box for visitors to use. But it would be handy to use it to store some large read-only audio files. I've installed smartctl & could post output from there if you think it is useful. I can't work out how to interpret the information.
View 7 Replies
View Related
Mar 12, 2010
I use Slackware64 -current. I will buy a SSD drive, normaly the filesystem in my laptop is EXT4. Is there anything that I need to know? How to improve life of the SSD? Is journaling a good option? How to disable?
View 14 Replies
View Related
Aug 31, 2010
I have a 3 year old laptop with the original battery and its drained pretty bad. The "Battery may be broken" popup was driving me insane and this is how you disable it, in case you are in the same situation as me. Open terminal
Code:
gconf-editor
Drill down to...
apps --> gnome-power-manager --> notify
uncheck the low_capacity checkbox. This should disable the popup for you if your battery has little life left in it. Now, if any knows how to disable the Avahi popup, let me know.
View 3 Replies
View Related
Feb 23, 2010
Is Ubunutu better than Windows 7 for general battery life?
View 9 Replies
View Related
May 12, 2010
So, I never got great battery life with 9.04 or 9.10, but it was acceptable. Here's the thing, with Windows 7 I can get about two hours. With Ubuntu I'm lucky if I get an hour, and I mean really lucky. I have selected to dim the brightness and to spin down the HDD when possible, it hasn't helped a whole lot. What I don't see is an option to underclock the CPU, which is done rather easily in Kubuntu.
View 9 Replies
View Related
Apr 30, 2010
Installed Lucid netbook-remix on my Aspire One with SSD and 3 cell battery last night. Under 9.10 I got 2hr 15mins with wifi and up to 3hr without wifi. This morning on the train to work I booted the new release only to find that without wifi I'm now getting only 1hr 20mins battery life (fully charged battery). I have the brightness turned down low to try and save a little power but it makes no difference. What can I do. As this is a netbook-remix release having just over an hour of battery life is plain awful and impractical.Any suggestions to increase battery life?
View 9 Replies
View Related
Mar 3, 2011
I've used an older version of ubuntu before, when it was brown and orange. I ran it off of a 8 gb solid state express card. Used it for about a month, didn't like it because I didn't know how to install anything and because it was slow (because ran off of a express card). Now, I'm looking to try ubuntu 10.10 on a partition of a main hard drive, specifically on the chrome os laptop when it comes out.
Now, I've read up that the battery life for ubuntu is mysteriously worse than on what would run a mac or a windows. This battery life issue is driving me away from ubuntu. How much battery life would I actually get for ubuntu if my battery life lasts 4 hours running a windows 7? And how much hard drive space do I need to partition to install ubuntu?
View 4 Replies
View Related
Nov 14, 2010
I've been using Ubuntu for the past four years, but I recently bought a Dell Mini 1012, and while Ubuntu 10.04 is wonderful in every way, it is giving me quite poor results in terms of battery life, compared to Windows 7 which is also installed on the device. I have been able to get 4.5 hours out of Ubuntu,compared to the 8 hours I have been able to get with Windows 7 Starter. I have tried everything suggested here in order to get better battery life out of Ubuntu, but without success.I'm wondering if I might have better success with another distribution.Are there any Linux distributions available that can claim longer battery life than others, on netbooks and in general? This question can be answered objectively if it is backed up with hard data from based on benchmarks,
View 1 Replies
View Related
Apr 1, 2010
I have a Samsung R510 laptop, with a short-life battery (holds up to 1.5 hours) Is there any way to make my laptop work longer by using some tweaks? Maybe it is possible to change the CPU according to the load?
View 3 Replies
View Related
Jan 8, 2011
I bought a dell mini 10v last spring and I have always gotten around 2-2.5 hrs max battery life. Is that all this 3-cell can pull off?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Feb 4, 2011
I currently use windows 7 on my laptop which gives me on average on 2 hours of battery life. If replace windows with ubuntu, would it allow more battery life time? I am a student, and I always have battery life issue when I work at uni.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Jul 6, 2011
i recently purchased my second laptop, primarily for linux. When i chose it, my main concern was battery life. Just to make a side note. When i say battery life, i mean how long the computer takes until the battery goes flat. Not how many years/ect it takes till the battery will no longer hold charge.
My new computer claims to be able to get 10 hours. Although it's a bit off, i get a satisfying little bit over 6 hours, from full charge. This is running Windows 7. I couldn't wait to put Linux on my new computer, i have, but it just isn't satisfying because i only get about 4 hours while running linux, tried three different distros, and all roughly the same.
View 8 Replies
View Related
Jun 2, 2011
I just upgraded to f15 x86_64. I use a VPCCEB3Z1E vaio laptop and I noticed that my laptop can't last more than half past an hour running from battery in wireless productivity (just surfing the net and make some word processing, so nothing so heavy...) I use kde 4, installed cpupowerutils (replacement for cpufrequtils), put the modules acpi_cpufreq, cpufreq-ondemand -powersave and the other governors in /etc/rc.d/rc.local for loading them at boot. Edited profiles in powerdevil (every profile has cpupowerutils freq-set -g and the name of a governor) but i still notice no changes. How I can get a better power management on this laptop? Fan still runs at high speed.
View 3 Replies
View Related
Mar 3, 2010
I've decided to format my netbook entirely and just run NBR. I still need a windows install because a lot of stuff still doesn't work correctly in wine.
will running a virtual windows install kill mu netbooks battery life quickly or is it the same as running any other program? also what's a good virtual OS program? I think the only one I know of it vmware or something?
View 1 Replies
View Related
Feb 24, 2011
First issue is, now that I am running Debian "Squeeze", my laptop runs much hotter than before. Its definitely hot on the very bottom compared to when running Windows. Once the system begins to heat up, the fans start spinning faster, the system gets louder, etc.
Second issue is battery life. I am able to get 5 hours out of the laptop in Windows, but maybe 2.5 hours in Debian. I am assuming that these two problems go hand in hand. Now from experience with PC hardware, I know that the newer chips scale their frequency and voltage depending on demand. I don't think the computer is doing this correctly when running Linux.
By running
cat /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling
I see that the CPU(s) are in T0 state (or 100%). Manually setting the frequency doesn't change anything either (via the gnome applet). Am I diagnosing this correctly?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Dec 31, 2009
This link, acpi: thermal/sysfs-api, explains how the new thermal management sysfs class is built, but doesn't give much information about using it. Using watch, I can see that the cur_state of cooling_device2 changes from 0 to 5 when I check "Dim display when idle" in Power Management Preferences. But I haven't found an applet that changes cooling_device0 or cooling_device1.
Echoing different integers to the cur_state files limits the maximum cpu frequency for cpu0 and cpu1, respectively. This behaviour is expected from what I've read, and mimics the options in Windows power manager for extending battery life by throttling the CPUs. I've had no luck with google and local man pages, so has anybody has seen an applet for controlling /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device[0|1]/cur_state?
On a side note, a value of 1 does slow the CPU down, but it will still hit 100C (normal for an Intel mobile duo core). However, values of 2 and larger throttle enough to lower the maximum CPU temp. Since the CPU temp is a good indicator of power consumption, it's pretty obvious that these two cur_state files are intended to extend battery life. dd_wizard
View 2 Replies
View Related
Apr 20, 2010
So I've come across several tips to optimize battery life on Linux. [URLs]. In addition to undervolting, I would like to underclock. Is there a way to control CPU speed outside of the BIOS via some software control in Linux... or some sort of boot manager? I would like to boot to linux using underclocked speeds and have Windows running full blast. Is there a way to run Linux completely in RAM? I have read that saves on power consumption from the hard drive.
View 4 Replies
View Related
Jan 23, 2010
I wanted to know if i can install 9.10 onto a usb flash drive--without using my computers hard drive at all when running ubuntu off the flash drive-
View 3 Replies
View Related
Jan 24, 2011
I have an Asus Eee PC with Ubuntu Netbook Remix (Unity). The other day, I turned off the wireless using the keyboard shortcut to save battery life when I was somewhere without wireless, but now it's not turning back on. I tried restarting, I've done the keyboard shortcut several times, and it still just says "disconnected" for wireless and wired, even though there are several wireless networks around me right now. There aren't any options in Network Connections or Network Tools to turn on the wireless. Is there a way to manually turn it back on?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Oct 8, 2010
I need to install an aplication to several machines. The aplication runs on a Debian and the installation process is done with a usb. I'm using a plop live usb to perform the installation. I've seen that with plop , once the live system is on, i can run some scripts.
What I'm trying to do is:
->format the target device (a 4G compact flash).
->mount the formatted device.
->untar my debian.tar.gz in that device.
After rebooting, the system never boots.
Using a live CD and invoking "fdisk -lu" :
[Code]...
View 8 Replies
View Related
Jun 16, 2011
Making a live CD using tools such as livecd-creator seems like a good solution to create a bootable read-only image to install on Compact Flash. My goal is to prevent failure due to write cycle limits of Compact Flash memory. A secondary goal is to have the live CD available for troubleshooting. However, Usenet postings indicate challenges in making the live CD image on CF bootable. Has anyone succeeded in doing this?
View 3 Replies
View Related
