I have been using Mandriva since the Mandrake time and I am so happy to use it as my primary distro. well, I bought this laptop Samsung RV508 and installed Mandriva Sprinng2010. It was ok on first few months but after that the battery life fell down drastically. I mean I could not use my Lap on battery atleast for one hour. Well I was under the impression that it could be a hardware issue but recently( few days ago) I installed open suse, some thing interesting I found out that my battery life is back. Now is wokring on Battery more than two hours at a stretch...

Well is it with the Distro?? I was using Gnome with some desktop effects on Mandriva. But that could be a possible reason to eat my battery power so fast? I am just thinking about to keep Opensuse on long term if this battery issue is only about Distro/Mandriva.. What you people think? Did any one come through such situation? Can Distro affect battery life of Laptop?

Power management is indirectly affected by a distro you use. More specifically it is related to a kernel version that a distro is using.
For some more information on the topic, see the following:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...le_uffda&num=1

please read this post to improve your battery life...
and regarding your battery life with openSUSE,this page says that it is best for laptops from battery point-of view !

thanx a lot for all who put some info on this issue...

please mark this thread as SOLVED,if you are satisfied with the answers !

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