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| Output of powerstat |
Showing posts with label Thinkpad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thinkpad. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
How to monitor Thinkpad power consumption in Xubuntu
I received my new battery yesterday and was curious about my laptop's power consumption. I did some searching and found the perfect tool. It's a small command-line application called powerstat. It's easy to run and available in the package manager.
Friday, July 18, 2014
IBM T42p RAM upgrade and new (used) 9-cell battery
My IBM T42p came with 1.5 GB of RAM--a 500 MB stick in the slot under the keyboard and a 1 GB stick in the slot on the back of the machine. Don't get me wrong, 1.5 GB of RAM is not bad, especially using Xubuntu. However, the machine can address a maximum of 2 GB, so I wanted to max it out.
I had an old 1 GB stick around the house from the old PC2700 DDR days, so I removed the keyboard and replaced the 500 MB stick with the 1 GB stick. See instructions for removing the keyboard below.
My Thinkpad came with a pretty crappy battery that lasted a cool 30 minutes. This meant, I was pretty much tethered to my outlet with the AC adaptor. I wanted a better battery, so I went to eBay. I bought a SANYO replacement (not genuine IBM/Lenovo) that was dead on arrival (DOA), but the seller gave me a refund. With the refund, I then bought a genuine--but used--IBM/Lenovo 9-cell battery that was guaranteed to last at least 3 hours.
I'll update this blog post when I receive my new (old) battery.
UPDATE:
The 9-cell battery I purchased on eBay arrived today and it looks like a great purchase.
It's been through only 3 charge cycles, and retains 96% of the designed charge capacity. With this capacity I should get between 3.5---4 hours of battery life between charges. See the tlp stats below.
I had an old 1 GB stick around the house from the old PC2700 DDR days, so I removed the keyboard and replaced the 500 MB stick with the 1 GB stick. See instructions for removing the keyboard below.
My Thinkpad came with a pretty crappy battery that lasted a cool 30 minutes. This meant, I was pretty much tethered to my outlet with the AC adaptor. I wanted a better battery, so I went to eBay. I bought a SANYO replacement (not genuine IBM/Lenovo) that was dead on arrival (DOA), but the seller gave me a refund. With the refund, I then bought a genuine--but used--IBM/Lenovo 9-cell battery that was guaranteed to last at least 3 hours.
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| DOA SANYO replacement battery |
I'll update this blog post when I receive my new (old) battery.
UPDATE:
The 9-cell battery I purchased on eBay arrived today and it looks like a great purchase.
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| New 9-cell battery |
It's been through only 3 charge cycles, and retains 96% of the designed charge capacity. With this capacity I should get between 3.5---4 hours of battery life between charges. See the tlp stats below.
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| My new 9-cell battery is awesome |
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Essential applications on a new Xubuntu install
Xubuntu is a pretty bare boned system, which makes it fast and lightweight. It's also easy to customize and really make your own. Following are a few things I did to customize my Thinkpad to my work flow.
Power Management
For advance power management I installed tlp. See site for details.
Office Suite
Xubuntu ships with Abiword for word processing and Gnumeric for manipulating spreadsheets. These programs are lightweight and easy to use, but not powerful enough for my needs. The obvious choice is LibreOffice, but I decided to go with Kingsoft Office. Kingsoft has been around for a while but only recently ported their office suite to linux. Although, it's still in alpha testing the applications are powerful, the UI is familiar and they are completely compatible with Microsoft Office generated files. Download here.
Design and graphics
For editing images, creating illustrations and page layouts, I use Gimp, Inkscape and Scribus, respectively. These are all available from the application center.
Internet
I use Firefox browser, which ships with Xubuntu. I added the Adblock Plus and Youtube HTML5 extension. I uninstalled Thunderbird and installed Geary mail client.
Python development
I use the Geany IDE for working with Python.
More to come later...
Power Management
For advance power management I installed tlp. See site for details.
Office Suite
Xubuntu ships with Abiword for word processing and Gnumeric for manipulating spreadsheets. These programs are lightweight and easy to use, but not powerful enough for my needs. The obvious choice is LibreOffice, but I decided to go with Kingsoft Office. Kingsoft has been around for a while but only recently ported their office suite to linux. Although, it's still in alpha testing the applications are powerful, the UI is familiar and they are completely compatible with Microsoft Office generated files. Download here.
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| Presentation Application |
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| Spreadsheet Application |
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| Word Processor |
Design and graphics
For editing images, creating illustrations and page layouts, I use Gimp, Inkscape and Scribus, respectively. These are all available from the application center.
 |
| Gimp |
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| Inkscape |
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| Scribus |
I use Firefox browser, which ships with Xubuntu. I added the Adblock Plus and Youtube HTML5 extension. I uninstalled Thunderbird and installed Geary mail client.
Python development
I use the Geany IDE for working with Python.
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| Geany |
My New (Old) Thinkpad has arrived
I'm a big Thinkpad fanatic--have always been. Recently, I saw an old IBM T42p on eBay for $80 and immediately purchased it. I thought it was a good deal considering that it originally cost almost 3 grand in 2005. I have a late 2011 15" MacBook Pro that I used for work and when I need lots of computing power, but I love playing around with the Thinkpad for everything else
The laptop has a large and bright 14.1" screen with 1400x1050 resolution. It has a 1.8GHz processor and came with a 1.5 GB of RAM and a 60GB Hitachi HD.
It came with Windows XP SP3 installed and not much else. Since, XP is no longer support I've decided to run Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, which is supported until 2017. I opted for Xubuntu because of its resource friendly and works great on older machines.
This blog serves two purposes:
The laptop has a large and bright 14.1" screen with 1400x1050 resolution. It has a 1.8GHz processor and came with a 1.5 GB of RAM and a 60GB Hitachi HD.
It came with Windows XP SP3 installed and not much else. Since, XP is no longer support I've decided to run Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, which is supported until 2017. I opted for Xubuntu because of its resource friendly and works great on older machines.
This blog serves two purposes:
- A place for me to keep a record of everything I did to the system. This is essential because I know I will break the system in the future because I'm always messing around with configuration files and installing unstable applications from untrusted sources.
- I decided to keep a blog so that others trying to run linux on old Thinkpads can learn from my experience and avoid spending hours in forums looking for solutions to problems that I've already encountered and solved.
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