I’ve got the Acer 1820pt tablet which is essentially the same as the one you have. I am interested in running Ubuntu but have heard that the battery optimisation isn’t as good as the one in Windows 7, since the tablet boasts an 8 hour battery life is it getting around that in Ubuntu?
I’m excited that I will be able to run something developed from mobile devices (ie. Android and Meego), which should improve the battery life and response time, cutting out the excesses that I don’t need to run in the background (aka Windows 7).
I will try out 10.10 with all the touchscreen fixes that you’ve created for our tablet though I’m not very comfortable with linux command lines and compiling!
Hey mrsamso,
your correct the 1820pt is very close to my 1825pt. In term of batter life, I could tell something:
Last days I found out, that the ubuntu one client kills my battery life, because it produces a cpu activity of 50% all the time, so I disabled ubuntu one and changed to dropbox and now my cpu activity is in idle around 0-5%.
The last month I used my 1825 I does not recognized this huge power consumption from the ubuntu one client and therefore my battery experiences are not very exact. With ubuntu one I got around 4 hours with wlan activated. Without wlan I got something over 6hours. I have done several optimizations to extend my battery life:
– I have put my /tmp/ and my /var/log/ to ramdisk(tmpfs) to reduce the hdd activity (I have 4gb ram, thats a huge amount for ubuntu)
– I use powertop (a tool from intel) to activated several power optimizations.
– I dropped some useless(for me) services from ubuntu to reduce cpu activity
– I use the gnome cpu clock applet to choose a approbriate profil for the cpu clock regulation
I think next days I could give better information about the ubuntu battery consumption. I estimate a additional battery life of something between 1 and 2 hours.
If you have some problems/questions with/to your acer 1820 and ubuntu, feel free to ask!
Your 8 hour battery life with windows, do you get that with or without wlan?
I can get 8 hours with just normal office use and idling with the screen brightness to low, wireless and bluetooth off. Turning off a few services in Windows 7 definitely helps as well as turning off components that I don’t need (ie. Ethernet, webcam etc). Though this is just an estimate based on batterybar I haven’t actually run the full tests because I don’t want to deplete the battery completely (I did it once by accident and there is now a 5% wear). Yesterday I watched 2 movies with wireless off and there’s still 4:20 hours left, so excellent compared to my Lenovo mini 10 with just an Atom processor!
For my average use with video, downloading and internet use with several tabs open I get about 7 hours.
I don’t have WAN on my model (would be very interested in how to install a 3G module), but I have tested it with a 3G usb modem and indeed it does suck quite a bit of power (I got about 5:30 hours with the modem connected and playing videos). This happens especially when you are streaming data like youtube or torrents, otherwise when idling or browsing static websites it isn’t so bad. My advice is also to get the flashblock addon to disable flash as this uses quite a bit of power as well (ie. advertisement banners).
I think Ubuntu likes to use the hard drive often and running a lot of little services compared to Windows, which could explain why Ubuntu rates poorly with battery life. That plus the device drivers which is probably bettery optimized in Windows.
I look forward to a much lighter Ubuntu that’s closer to the way mobile OSes works instead of the heavy duty desktop OSes. This would definitely help extend the battery life with succinct operations and less running services. That’s why I’m also looking at Meego and Android though I know Android doesn’t support our resolution yet.
I’ll see how much I can get out of Windows 7 with a review and tests on battery life and operations as a tablet, then I will try Ubuntu 10.10 when its finally ready for tablets (and I don’t have to configure too much!).
Ok, now I could tell about my experiences with battery life without ubuntu one(must be a bug).
I got something about 7-8 hours (like you with windows) with disabled bluetooth, wlan only ~30min. display most time in middle position(automatic dimm to low if no use) and office(writing transscript) use.(3 leasons in the university + some time at home).
I think Ubuntu is good as windows in the battery life term.
Hi,
I’ve got the Acer 1820pt tablet which is essentially the same as the one you have. I am interested in running Ubuntu but have heard that the battery optimisation isn’t as good as the one in Windows 7, since the tablet boasts an 8 hour battery life is it getting around that in Ubuntu?
I’m excited that I will be able to run something developed from mobile devices (ie. Android and Meego), which should improve the battery life and response time, cutting out the excesses that I don’t need to run in the background (aka Windows 7).
I will try out 10.10 with all the touchscreen fixes that you’ve created for our tablet though I’m not very comfortable with linux command lines and compiling!
Hey mrsamso,
your correct the 1820pt is very close to my 1825pt. In term of batter life, I could tell something:
Last days I found out, that the ubuntu one client kills my battery life, because it produces a cpu activity of 50% all the time, so I disabled ubuntu one and changed to dropbox and now my cpu activity is in idle around 0-5%.
The last month I used my 1825 I does not recognized this huge power consumption from the ubuntu one client and therefore my battery experiences are not very exact. With ubuntu one I got around 4 hours with wlan activated. Without wlan I got something over 6hours. I have done several optimizations to extend my battery life:
– I have put my /tmp/ and my /var/log/ to ramdisk(tmpfs) to reduce the hdd activity (I have 4gb ram, thats a huge amount for ubuntu)
– I use powertop (a tool from intel) to activated several power optimizations.
– I dropped some useless(for me) services from ubuntu to reduce cpu activity
– I use the gnome cpu clock applet to choose a approbriate profil for the cpu clock regulation
I think next days I could give better information about the ubuntu battery consumption. I estimate a additional battery life of something between 1 and 2 hours.
If you have some problems/questions with/to your acer 1820 and ubuntu, feel free to ask!
Your 8 hour battery life with windows, do you get that with or without wlan?
Hi Toffer,
I can get 8 hours with just normal office use and idling with the screen brightness to low, wireless and bluetooth off. Turning off a few services in Windows 7 definitely helps as well as turning off components that I don’t need (ie. Ethernet, webcam etc). Though this is just an estimate based on batterybar I haven’t actually run the full tests because I don’t want to deplete the battery completely (I did it once by accident and there is now a 5% wear). Yesterday I watched 2 movies with wireless off and there’s still 4:20 hours left, so excellent compared to my Lenovo mini 10 with just an Atom processor!
For my average use with video, downloading and internet use with several tabs open I get about 7 hours.
I don’t have WAN on my model (would be very interested in how to install a 3G module), but I have tested it with a 3G usb modem and indeed it does suck quite a bit of power (I got about 5:30 hours with the modem connected and playing videos). This happens especially when you are streaming data like youtube or torrents, otherwise when idling or browsing static websites it isn’t so bad. My advice is also to get the flashblock addon to disable flash as this uses quite a bit of power as well (ie. advertisement banners).
I think Ubuntu likes to use the hard drive often and running a lot of little services compared to Windows, which could explain why Ubuntu rates poorly with battery life. That plus the device drivers which is probably bettery optimized in Windows.
I look forward to a much lighter Ubuntu that’s closer to the way mobile OSes works instead of the heavy duty desktop OSes. This would definitely help extend the battery life with succinct operations and less running services. That’s why I’m also looking at Meego and Android though I know Android doesn’t support our resolution yet.
I’ll see how much I can get out of Windows 7 with a review and tests on battery life and operations as a tablet, then I will try Ubuntu 10.10 when its finally ready for tablets (and I don’t have to configure too much!).
Ok, now I could tell about my experiences with battery life without ubuntu one(must be a bug).
I got something about 7-8 hours (like you with windows) with disabled bluetooth, wlan only ~30min. display most time in middle position(automatic dimm to low if no use) and office(writing transscript) use.(3 leasons in the university + some time at home).
I think Ubuntu is good as windows in the battery life term.