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Comment by va_coder | Hacker News Reader

An OEM laptop with 8 hours of battery life please

Not really OEM, but I'm running 11.04 on an Acer 3810T laptop. I am getting 6 hours on it with wi-fi, and the battery has lost about 10% of its charge capacity. With a brand new battery I could see it getting about 7-7.5 hours.

An OEM with a newer processor and an SSD should be able to hit 8 hours easily.

I have the 3810T too and I can report similar numbers. But still, I get more life when I boot into Windows. Moreover, suspend & hibernate just don't work & the laptop fan always stays on.

It could be a buggy BIOS for all I know but we could still do better. Thus, an OEM option where _everything works_ would definitely be nice.

As far as the suspend/hibernate issue try adding i8042.reset to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT variable in /etc/default/grub

the fan thing is a problem for me too, but it doesn't get crazy loud.

Also check if you have the latest BIOS from Acer. Latest version is 1.28 I think.

I do have the v1.28 BIOS. And I think I did try that and all the other options I possibly could when I first got this laptop. I've just settled for the loud fan. Anyway, I'm going to upgrade to the new release and see what that brings!

I upgraded to 11.10 today and guess what, suspend works! I had to add `i8042.reset` to grub config but finally, working suspend!

Did you try "sudo apt-get install fancontrol"?

Thanks, I just installed it. No immediate results but I will play around with it.

thinkpad x220 with the 19+ slice battery extension gets me 10 hours (real, reported 11/12). That's under arch with some power tweaking.

Too bad the display is terrible.

I have the X220 and I love the display... Did you not get the IPS option?

I did but it has severe image persistence. Lenovo dodged for a while on this issue but finally has stepped up and admitted a problem and is replacing displays (just started). I'm going to be getting mine repaired.

It's a topic for a separate rant but it's a shame no other hw manufacturer has stepped up to offer build quality along the lines of apple's unibodies.

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