Linux vs WinXP: Power usage on laptop?

[carbon-12]

OK does anyone know if a distro like slackware/gentoo/debian would consume less energy than WinXP on a laptop, assuming I booted up and left it alone.

[Dark Ninja]

I would think no. Your laptop's battery life depends on how much it's hardware is working. For example, your battery life would decrease drastically if you tried to compile OpenOffice as opposed to just letting Windows XP sit idle.

Maybe the power management is better -- but that would be something you would configure. Either way, I'm still sticking with my original answer of "generally not."

Then again...I could be wrong.:p

[Hayl]

it's going to depend on the kernel. the 2.6.x kernel has better power save features.

has nothing to do with the distro you are running (unles they are forcing you to not upgrade your kernel).

There is a good article on this subject (APM) in the March 2004 issue of Linux Journal; unfortunately they did not compare Linux to Windows. I have yet to find a good ACPI Article.

They should be similar (windows and linux) however I imageine it would take a bit of work to get linux set up exactly the way you wanted it.

[carbon-12]

Thanks for the quick responses guys.

Yeah everyone kept saying that WinXP was a such a resource hog, so I thought that would tax the hardware more and use up more energy.

Ill go and check out that article.

[Sepero]

My vote goes to Gentoo with a light WindowManager.
It may not save you a whole lot on the expense of hardware usage, but I bet it'll save you loads of[[[[[[[[ CPU clock cycles.

[stiles]

Windows will consume less energy, acpi just has a lot of advantages over apm when it comes to power consumption. Now you can get the latest acpi patches and configure most of the functionality but it's a bit of a pain in the ***. The acpi patches are getting better though.

[Hayl]

Originally posted by Sepero
My vote goes to Gentoo with a light WindowManager.
It may not save you a whole lot on the expense of hardware usage, but I bet it'll save you loads of[[[[[[[[ CPU clock cycles.

Sepero, we are talking about ACPI and APM when the laptop goes into power save mode after X number of minutes, and the HDD spins down and/or processors cycles down.

Originally posted by stiles
[quote]Windows will consume less energy, acpi just has a lot of advantages over apm when it comes to power consumption. Now you can get the latest acpi patches and configure most of the functionality but it's a bit of a pain in the ***. The acpi patches are getting better though.

ACPI is native to 2.6.x kernels.

[lagitus]

I have had very good results on an AMD 1800+ laptop using SuSE Linux. On a long trip I didn't notice the fan going on even once even though I used KDE 3.1.4 and even compiled a few files occasionally. It had kept the cpu frequency as low as possible all the time when on battery power, which XP failed to do. I did try a longer compile once and it did increase the frequency but it doesn't do it immediately like XP seems to do.

If your hardware is supported then I would say Linux definately gives better results with harddisk usage (which one can really hear) and cpu frequency managment. I've also heard SuSE has the best pre-set settings for laptops.

[stiles]

Originally posted by Hayl
ACPI is native to 2.6.x kernels.

Yes I know. Can it wake up from a suspend to RAM yet, last time I checked it didn't work. Have you tried to configure acpi on a linux laptop? The acpi patches have more bug fixes that is in either branch and generaly work better.