I’ve had this Lenovo for about 2 years, plug it in to charge, then use it on battery. Basically run it down to 10% or so, charge it to 100% too. Recently. batter life has plummeted from 4-6 hours to maybe 2. I haven’t changed what I do, or brightness. Is there a tool to measure battery life, or a tool to make the laptop more efficient? Running Manjaro with KDE Plasma.
There is tlp.
Though I am not sure if the 10 % threshold might be a little bit low for the “wear and tear”. I usually let my battery discharge to a little bit under 25 % and then I charge it completely. Batteries need charging and discharging but a deep discharge is not good for the health of the battery, at least not doing it regularly. I know some people do not even recommend charging the battery always till 100 %, rather to 80 or 90.
You can also tell Plasma to warn you at a specific percentage from the power saving options.
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If the battery is still good, then TLP is a great suggestion.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll try TLP. I bet the battery is still good, it seems more like it suddenly happened, not that it has slowly gotten down to that point, if that makes sense.
Once TLP is installed though, what do you do? I can see this about battery, and that charge levels matches what KDE is saying.
Charge = 39.9 [%]
Capacity = 89.4 [%]
First of all the defaults usually work just well but of course you can tweak the stuff though you have to look at the documentation. E.g. I sometimes use the charging thresholds or you can re-calibrate the battery. Have a look here:
https://linrunner.de/tlp/settings/battery.html
If you like to try things out then just go ahead but if you just want tlp to do its work then you can just leave it how it is for now and compare your battery life with before.
Personally I have no need to tweak anything more than what I described before.
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Just starting the service will make it ‘work’ then? I want to do minimal tweaking at first just to see what’s what.
Yes. Start it as root or with sudo:
tlp start
You can check if it runs (superuser):
tlp-stat -s
OK, I had done all that. I’ll give it a few days and try not to cycle 0-100% on it any more.
OK, some combination of these (likely tlp more than anything) seems to be helping. Battery appears to charge faster, and lasts longer between charges. Thanks
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Running into some issues with this now. USB devices (mouse, keyboard, SD card reader) won’t power on/work. An SD card right into the SD card reader does, and USB drives do, but those 3 other things don’t, even with power cord in. I think this is related to TLP, but don’t know how to test.
Would uninstalling it at least let me see if that’s the problem? Stopping the TLP service doesn’t fix the problem.
Tlp can interfere with those albeit it never did here. Stopping tlp should be sufficient though. If not then I would definitely try to reboot or even uninstall it.
You can also have a look into:
Thanks! Uninstall + reboot fixed it (finally it could see my phone instead of just charging it). I’ll have to read through this and try to reinstall it. It definitely did help battery, but I wouldn’t want that at the expense of not being able to plug in USB devices!