Showing battery charge

[GreyGeek]

Kubuntu 12.04 would never show the battery state or charge on this Acer Aspire V3-771G laptop.
Last week replace Precise with Tahr.
Now, when I hover my mouse over the battry icon in the system tray it not only shows if I am plugged in or not, it also shows the state of charge in my Logitech M215 optical mouse!
I went from no battery info to a twofer!!

I also upgraded my grandson's Sony VAIO FW-140E/H laptop from Precise to Tahr yesterday. Like mine, it Precise would never give battery info. Now it does. As a bonus the frame rate of the Intel Mobil 4 Integrated Video chip is about twice what it was in Precise. That's the power of the new 3.13 kernel!

My installation of Tahr is showing no issues. On the Sony there are some cases when the video crashes and the login is redisplayed. Noticed that while trying out Minecraft on full screen and rapidly moving the mouse. I changed the video setting to GPL 2.0 with xrender and that seemed to help both the speed and the stability. GPL 3.x is unusable. Probably because the Sony is six years old.

[Simon]

I know Lithium Ion cost a little bit more, but my laptop I use and purchased dirt cheap, came with those Ni-Cad (Nickle Cadmium) batteries. I replaced it with Lithium right away... still have the old Ni-Cad in a drawer. I don't even know if they sell or make Ni-Cad for laptops anymore. For those who don't know the difference in what I this means;

Nic-Cad
Gas bubbles form in the cell plates, reducing the space for recharge. The only way around this is to discharge the battery completely before recharging it. Also if the battery charges too long, it can explode and there goes the laptop.

Lithium Ion
The only drawback to these batteries is you NEVER want to drain them much lower than 10% because it will be near next to impossible to recharge a dead one. Most claim to have a 5-hour battery life, but this measurement is made with idle computers to sell batteries. The hard drive, DVD/CD disk drives and LCD display all use the most battery power. I get about 2.5 hours out of mine.

[GreyGeek]

Excellent, spot-on info, Simon!