On Mon, Aug 13, 2012, at 08:54 PM, Toby Corkindale wrote:
On 13/08/12 16:24, Toby Corkindale wrote:
Hi, When I boot my ThinkPad into Windows, I can set the battery to operate in long-life mode. It then only charges up to 90% capacity, and won't start charging until it has dropped below 80% capacity.
This is claimed to make the battery live longer -- and so far the battery HAS lasted much better than they have in previous laptops.
(Of course, if I'm going to a conference, I can configure the battery to charge up to 100% again easily)
I wondered if there is any way to achieve this behaviour in Linux?
There seems to have been some confusion regarding my post, above. It's my fault for not being clearer.
I was talking about maintaining a battery which keeps its ability to hold a full charge. ie. By only charging the battery to ~90%, you can discharge/recharge it many more times, and still get close to the original life out of it, rather than if you charged it to 100% every time.
With other laptops, I've noticed that after a year or two of use, they become nearly useless on battery. This Lenovo is doing really well after a couple, and I am assuming it's from the above behaviour. (But could be wrong.. maybe battery tech suddenly became much better? I doubt it.)
Hi Toby. I have been setting up a ThinkPad T61 with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS over the last few days and have done two things: 1. Installed the laptop-mode-tools package, which bundles up a number of power-saving and laptop-specific tweaks: http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/ 2. Started looking at tp_smapi, which includes the feature that I think you are wanting. The arch wiki has a good overview: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tp_smapi "It's bad for most laptop batteries to hold a full charge for long periods of time. You should try to keep your battery in the 40-80% charged range, unless you need the battery life for extended periods of time... tp_smapi lets you control the start and stop charging threshold to do just that. " And there is a lot of info at the (fantastic) ThinkWiki site: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Tp_smapi There are Ubuntu and Debian packages for tp_smapi. I will let you know how I go with it. Would be interested in other people's thoughts on best practices with battery management on Linux. Regards Graeme