[Laptop] Battery Time

[Jessica Mahoney]

Thinking about this for a while, I decided to post it.  May not be much, 
but it is something.

In July 2007 I acquired a brand new Compaq Presario V6000Z laptop.  It 
came with the "High Capacity 6-Cell Battery" (6,000 mAh battery), an AMD 
Turion 64 X2 @ 1.8GHz, and I also got the "Imprint Finish" so I could 
get the FireWire and additional USB ports.  For what it is, $1,000 
wasn't that bad.

It came with Windows Vista Home Basic.  This system took about two 
minutes to boot, and sucked the battery dry in 90 minutes, even with all 
power-saving settings enabled (eeps!).

Then I installed Linux on it.  Linux had some serious stability issues, 
and even with everything I did, it was never all that stable, but it 
booted in about a minute.  Linux did do better with battery time, 
clocking 2 hours.  True, that's not much better, but still.

Well, I've been using FreeBSD for my servers, and I have had a few 
FreeBSD desktops off and on over the years, so I decided to give it a 
shot.  After installing FreeBSD and configuring the kernel/world, and 
then installing some ports, I noticed something wildly different, so 
different, that its freaking amazing.  FreeBSD boots in a mere fifteen 
seconds (kernel: 11s; services: 2s; gdm+Xorg: instant; gnome-desktop: 
2s).  FreeBSD is just as amazing with battery time, as I can now get not 
just two, but four hours of battery time.  Plus, its just as 
rock-solid-will-keep-running-until-the-sun-blows-up stable as I remember 
from every other machine I've used as a FreeBSD desktop.

Quick recap:
Windows Vista: 2 minute boot, 90 minutes of battery
Linux: one minute boot, 120 minutes of battery
FreeBSD: 15 second boot, 240 minutes of battery

FreeBSD is pure awesomeness, made of awesome and win, featuring Power, 
Performance, Stability, and Reliability.  I have also learned (from my 
laptop) that FreeBSD is also a Green OS, as it causes the hardware to 
use less power than other systems.


~Jessica