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Comment by sophacles | Hacker News Reader

On top of that, I will never consider switching away from my Macbook until the following things are true:

* battery will last several hours (macbook still at 4+ hrs on full charge and it is 1.5 yrs old)

* very good (open) acpi support - if I can't 100% trust closing and opening to just suspend and resume correctly, I won't use it for anything other than toy purposes. (and open because I will be using my own kernel, or at least my own install of a distro, so it needs to be supported or at least compilable for every kernel).

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Thinkpad already has both problems solved. Getting 12-14 hours on my thinkpad T420 with a 9 cell and a power script written to make all the items found "bad" by powertop2 turn to "good". Switched from x220 (which was getting roughly the same battery life) because its 1366x768 screen wasn't quite enough for on-the-go work.

As for the lid opening and closing doing what it's supposed to, it does. Coincidentally, the ACPI also works flawlessly on my wife's 5 year old Japanese Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Edit: here's a link to a thread in which I described the steps I took to get great battery life out of my thinkpad T420. May need tweaking for different thinkpad models, but I used it on my x220 as well with only minimal changes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3562267

Do you have any more details on how to create such a script?

I have a T510 and despite the 80 watt hour battery I get only <4 hours of runtime.

edited my initial comment to include the information. HTH.

Is it possible to get powertop2 on Linux Mint? I can't even find a source download; their alleged source repo at git.moblin.org seems to be down. Going to that domain gives me a "502 Bad Gateway" error.

Edit: ah, "git clone git://git.moblin.org/powertop powertop2" works.

I'm using Ubunutu 12.04 (and learning to love the bomb, err, Unity) on a Samsung 15-inch Series 9, and those things you mention work fine. Small irritants include a screen of less quality than I expected (vertical viewing angle is minimal), a keyboard that is more noisy than I wish, and a touchpad that I can't get to disable during typing. But it's fast, quiet, large-screened and has more than enough horsepower for development (using it for Google App Engine work right now).

FWIW I've got the 13-inch Series 9 on Debian, and everything just works, including disabling the touchpad with a keystroke.

What I'd really like is to be able to disable touchpad clicks without disabling scrolling, but I understand if I'm on my own for that one.

I can disable touchpad clicks but not scrolling using synclient on my Thinkpad. In fact, I configured the whole thing to act as a scroll surface and nothing else.

You should look into syndaemon. This will disable the touchpad when you are typing. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics#Disa...

Also, the screen on the Series 9 is one of the better screens out there. Also, I don't find the keyboard on my 13" loud though.

> (macbook still at 4+ hrs on full charge and it is 1.5 yrs old)

My MacBook Pro, mid-2009, original battery:

    Temperature = 2982
    CycleCount = 591
    DesignCycleCount9C = 1000
    DesignCapacity = 5450
    MaxCapacity = 4814
    WearRatio = 88%
    CurrentCapacity = 1514
    ChargeRatio = 31%
    Voltage = 11077
    Amperage = -694
    InstantAmperage = -661
    InstantTimeToEmpty = 2:17
    TimeRemaining = 2:11
    AvgTimeToEmpty = 2:11
    FullToEmptyTime = 6:56

(this is from a python script of mine [0])

Close to three years of daily, heavy use. The thing just doesn't want to die (crossing fingers).

[0] https://gist.github.com/2630561

Here are the stats from my MacBook Pro (also mid 2009, 13-inch, original battery):

  Temperature = 2990
  CycleCount = 488
  DesignCycleCount9C = 1000
  DesignCapacity = 5450
  MaxCapacity = 4804
  WearRatio = 88%
  CurrentCapacity = 4804
  ChargeRatio = 100%
  Voltage = 12568
  Amperage = 253
  InstantAmperage = 88
  TimeRemaining = 0:8
  AvgTimeToFull = 0:8

I seem to be missing the InstantTimeToEmpty and FullToEmptyTime data. Reading your script, that tells me the values are "None" but not why that is. I'm also apparently 8 minutes from an empty battery, even though it's fully charged. Do you know why this is?

Amperage is positive: you're charging. So:

- TimeToEmpty makes no sense.

- you're 8 minutes to full.

Doh! Thanks for the update.

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