8
bahua
6y

If you have a system76 laptop and are frustrated with the battery life, like I was, maybe I can help you. Following a mishmash of instructions I found online, I've extended my battery life from about two hours to almost five.

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  • 2
    @bahua, any linky links?
  • 1
    @NeatNerdPrime

    I wanted to gauge interest with the initial post, but we're currently in full-on morning mode with a baby, a toddler, and a dog. I'll post some specifics during nap time, later today.
  • 1
    The Oryx Pro is an extremely powerful machine, especially for a laptop. But for me, when it's on battery power, I'm not playing games or doing things that require large amounts of CPU, so I wrote a couple scripts to help with this.

    This reddit post talks about things you can do to reduce power consumption when running on battery. Reducing CPU frequency, and the number of active cores/threads, and turning off turbo boosting.

    http://bu.tl/dW

    One of the most obvious improvements available is switching away from the nvidia graphics card to the integrated intel card. This system76 page talks about that:

    http://bu.tl/AO

    I wrote this script to blank the screen while running X, if the lid is closed, and to turn it back on when the lid opens back up.

    http://bu.tl/in

    By default though, the system goes into suspend when you close the lid. I don't like that, so I uncommented and changed the "HandleLidSwitch" to "ignore" in the /etc/systemd/logind.conf file.
  • 1
    Here are the scripts I wrote for handling CPU frequency and core/thread numbers.

    This is what I execute when the machine is running on battery. It turns off 10/12 threads(5/6 cores), scales the remaining threads down to 900 MHz each, and disables turbo boosts.

    http://bu.tl/PJ

    I run this script when the machine is back on AC power.

    http://bu.tl/HJ

    Using these techniques(with still more wiggle room) I've managed to clock in four hours and twenty-three minutes on battery, with X running, and the screen on the whole time. This is not the best in the world, but it's better than double the factory state. And it's great for me.
  • 0
    Oh so you are talking about my portable desktop pc?
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