So i have gotten a t490 just recently, and ive installed fedora on it, gnome power profiles daemon said it was “on my lap” and wouldn’t let me change the power profiles even when on a desk. So i masked that, and installed auto-cpufreq, but the laptop still draws about 10W (according to powertop) when watching a youtube video, leading to 4-5 hours of battery life.
any tips on how to reduce the power consumption?
Well Li-ion batteries are known in conventional wisdom to degrade to 70% of brand new battery life after being charged 500-1000 times. So if it was supposed to have 8 hours when new then 5-6 makes sense.
When I played around with my laptop’s power settings, the LCD screen and screen-brightness were a big power draw between 3W at dim to like 15W at max. That and all wireless functions off, if you can have an ethernet cord plugged in, no bluetooth or USB devices plugged then you can maximize your battery life. Years ago I got my laptop to host a minecraft server with screen off to like 4-5 W at idle.
E: And don’t forget if you have a backlit keyboard to turn that off.
Oddly the laptop seems brand new when I got it, it still had the peel on the power button lmao. Also, thanks for the tips!
There’s software to check how many mAh most laptop batteres are able to take up and deliver, compared to what they shipped with. Modern ones even have how many complete 0-100 charge cycluses the battery have gone through. You can check if you think there’s something dodgy about the battery. I’ve actually seen laptops factory shipped with smaller batteries than ordered.
But knowing linux and seeing you had an issue with the power profiles I’d think it’s software related hah. Is there a discrete GPU onboard it’s using instead of the power-saving one perhpas?. Also, did you turn off that awful “dynamic background” on youtube that continually taxes the CPU?