UNR 9.04 - Battery life slice, wifi woes

First off, I'm using a 10.1 in. model with a 160GB HD and 2GB of RAM (upgraded from 1). I don't know the exact model name, though I purchased this in late July.

I actually had to install UNR 9.04 on here to use my college's wireless... because, let's face it, XP's wireless management sucks. ;[

However, I'm noticing a sharp drop in battery life. XP can reach nearly four hours with the default battery, yet UNR only maxes out at two! This isn't an issue at the college due to plugs being virtually everywhere.

However, the wireless likes to drop randomly in one of the lounge areas we have. It seems to work just fine everywhere else, which is puzzling... but what really irks me is how it seems to work flawlessly under XP once I finally manage to get it connected.

Has anyone else experienced such issues, or know of any fixes to them...?

(...How ironic. I actually had the wireless crap out on me TWICE during this post.)

e: ew default emotes

 

For that config, battery life sounds about right; with 9.04 desktop, I get ~2.5 hours with 3-cell battery, and about 5 hours with 6-cell. If you need more, get a 6-cell battery. Turning down screen brightness will help reduce power consumption. As far as I can remember, I'm not seeing much difference for battery life between XP and Ubuntu.

If you most of your time online is with Firefox, type about:config into the address box, and change these two values:

set browser.cache.disk.enable to "false". This will disable all disk cacheing, which will reduce HDD activity, which reduces the load on the battery. You may also wish to decrease the cache size (browser.cache.disk.capacity) to a lower value to reduce memory usage over time; I've got mine set to 25000, and Firefox is now less of a memory hog, although if you have 2 gb of RAM, this may be less of an issue. With 2 gb of RAM, you should almost never be hitting the disk swap file.

No suggestions re WiFi; performance has always been rock solid for me (again, I'm running 9.04 desktop, not UNR, which just seemed to flaky for me).

 

I usually do run my netbook at minimum brightness when it isn't plugged in, unless lighting conditions are a bit weird. (I get better life on XP with maximum brightness, too, I think...)

I just switched browser.cache.disk.enable to false. I'm not headed off to my classes until tomorrow, however, so I'll have to see how performance is for me with said option switched tomorrow. The only other thing I can think of affecting my battery life is that I'm using the standard desktop, since I can't stand the netbook launcher. Makes it feel like it's less of a computer to me... though if it's that big a factor I'll probably reenable it.

As for wireless... I thought I had a fix with the alternate driver, but I ended up having to disable it because it broke wireless altogether. I'll check out UNR 9.10 once it's released, but if I continue to have issues I'll replace it with the standard version. Is there any noticable performance difference?