[Techtalk] power management woes

[Janina Szkut]

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I've been having problems with power management on my laptop for quite
awhile.  Originally, I had installed Mandrake, which used APM.  I had
the problem that the battery meter would jump from about 30% to 2%.  I
tried looking for solutions, but sort of gave up.  Then, compiling a
kernel after I switched to Debian gave me new hope - I figured I would
try ACPI since it was included with 2.6.x.  But after a lot of
experimenting and installing miscellaneous packages, nothing really
worked, and my battery was now jumping from about 70% to 2%.  Also,
TuxTime (the frontend to the toshiba linux utilities) didn't work with
ACPI either.  So, today I figured I would try going back to APM, since
it at least gave me more battery life than with ACPI.  Now it is going
from 90% to 2%.  I am extremely frustrated, because I have enabled
everything I thought possible, and even though the Toshiba linux
utilities now function, they don't seem to be having any sort of effect
whatsoever on my battery life.

At the moment, I am using a Toshiba Satellite 1800, which is about a
year and a half old.  I am running Debian Sid, with all the packages
upgraded, on 2.6.3.  I have APM enabled in the kernel, along with the
other APM options that aren't work-arounds.  I also have the Toshiba
linux utilities installed.  Cpufreqd doesn't want to run, and hdparm
seems sort of useless since TuxTime is supposed to be able to do the
same thing.

If anyone has any suggestions/sympathy/stories to share please do so...I
am nearly at the end of my rope :(

Thanks,

Janina
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