Comment by anonymousiam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymousiam | Hacker News Reader

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Energy Star can be frustrating as well. My latest laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad) has an Energy Star rating. To get this, they need to do things like turn off the power to the audio pre-amp if there's no sound being played. When a sound is ready to be played, latency is undesirable, so it gets pushed to the amp before the amp has powered up. The result is some fraction of a second of missing sound, and also an annoying click through the speakers when the amp is powered down after the sound stops.

I would rather have sound without these issues, even if my computer consumes an extra 100mW at idle to keep the sound system ready.

I'm aware that most sound chipsets allow a user override that keeps the circuits on, but the this newer chipset doesn't seem to implement the feature correctly. No combination of arguments to the linux sound system, or loadable modules seems to keep the sound circuits from switching to standby.

I've had problems with modern monitors shutting themselves off if they don't detect a signal in something like five or ten seconds, which is far too short when I'm trying to debug a PC having boot issues, configure a multi-monitor setup (like a 3-screen virtual pinball cabinet) or even just figure out which HDMI cable is which on the PC end. I don't mind the auto-off feature but the incredibly short time period is unnecessary and the delay time isn't adjustable (at least on the LG monitors I have).

This over-aggressiveness turns a good feature into a problem forcing me to completely disable power saving. Which is sad because the biggest savings of the feature are when a screen is left on for hours when the PC is off or disconnected (which I don't do anyway, as the entire system is on a smart power strip). A monitor should hunt for a valid signal for at least 45 or 60 seconds by default before auto-offing itself.

Another "power saving gone awry" issue is that USB selective suspend can cause wireless mice to stutter after not moving for just a few seconds. I think this is due to lag in the wake-up time. Unfortunately, the interface doesn't have any time adjustment, so I have to just turn selective suspend.

That sounds like Lenovo just being bad? Certainly they could fix the issue but instead chose the cheaper option.

The cheaper option would have been to not implement the Energy Star feature that dynamically powers the chipset on and off.

AFAICT my MBP M1 is energy star certified but has no such issue. Might it just be that the Lenovo has a bad implementation?

Interesting. I had similar things from other machines, and the solution is to keep a silent audio file playing in the background at all times, then there is no latency.

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