Dell Inspiton 8600 notebook and Power Managment

[Paul Kaletta]

Hi,

I just got a Dell 8600 notebook. FreeBSD installed rather smothly and
pretty much everything worked out of the box. Excepty memory
managment. I have to say that I didn't investigate this issue very far
yet. The handbook doesn't go very deep and the ACPI related manpages are
very brief. I think that this notebook is pretty common and some of you
certainly have similar problems. Please share your experience.

I observed the following issues:

The notebook runs rather hot. Under windows xp it is much cooler and
also the build in ventilator (what's the proper english word for those
spinning thing? I can't say the cooler spins up, can I? :-)) doesn't
spin up that often.

I experimented a little with suspending the system.

acpiconf -s 5 works (it just halts the system and powers off).

acpiconf -s 3 restarts the computer after suspending. The handbook
suggests putting hw.acpi.disable_on_poweroff="0" in loader.conf. That
doesn't work for me.

acpiconf -s 1 make the computer sleep, howerver the display remains
on. If I press the powerbutton, it wakes up. The connection to the
USB-mouse is lost, but the system imediatelly recognizes it
again. Unfortunatelly moused dies and has to be restarted again.

After I played around with suspending the system I wanted to listen to
mp3-music. I noticed that the pitch of the sound was slightly higher
than usual, so that voices sounded pretty funny. This phenomenon went
away after a reboot.

Oh, and a final question: Can anyone recommed a good (preferably
console) utility that can show me various Power Managment things like
battery level, CPU-Throttling settings, CPU-Frequency and so on?

Thanks

Paul