Fedora 14 and Battery Life?

[graycolor]

Does Windows 7 get better battery life compared to Fedora. I'm about to purchase a t410s, and from reviews it's battery life is quite low. I don't want to run Fedora if it's going to eat even more battery life.

I know Linux tends to run hotter and have about 30 mins less battery life. This was the case about a year ago, does this still hold true for Fedora today or has Linux finally overcome Windows?

[Wayne]

I *felt* when I ran Mint 10 on a Thinkpad Edge, that battery life was shorter under Linux. I tweaked all I could but in the end put Windows 7 back on the machine. Since I paid for it anyway, I thought I might as well use it

Also, when charging, the charged amount and time remaining till fully charged seemed very erratic. Sometimes it said "5 minutes to full charge" so I put it to sleep and came back to it later only to find it still wasn't fully charged, or so it said at any rate.

[swvines]

The thing about battery life to keep in mind that it degrades over time. I dual boot windows 7 and my battery last maybe 2 hours at most after just 6 months, when i originally purchased it, it was rated for 7 hours. To get more hours out of laptops you'll need to sacrifice quite a bit. Run a dimmer screen, sleep after just minutes, don't use a screen saver, don't use peripherals like a USB Keyboard or mouse, cut the desktop effects, etc...
I don't see a difference between the battery life on Windows 7 and F14. I'm running the KDE version and it's pretty good at making adjustments to save the battery. Linux and KDE generally will cut more processes that windows 7 to save the battery. Like disabling the transparency and stop indexing files. But like I said, there's not really a difference in how long they'll last.
I can say that Linux still hasn't nailed the estimated battery life. I unplugged my laptop right before I started writing this post, and in 3 minutes i went from 99% to 93%. But last night it went from 15% to 10% after a full hour of use.

[forkbomb]

I can't offer any proper statistics but in my experience, and I've never run Win7 on a laptop, battery life in general sucks on Linux compared to XP. That goes for pretty much all distros I've tried. There are ways to scrimp (namely, use a desktop environment that isn't a pig), but I've never seen any distro squeeze more life out of a battery than XP (on the same machine). Can't speak for Win7.

For some reason on my netbook (running Arch at the moment), charge time is marginally slow compared to XP.

[DavidMcCann]

For some tips on reducing power drain, see http://www.lesswatts.org/