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Alex
Asked: 2013-07-29 10:54:23 +0800 CST

Why do I get this unusual PowerTop readings?

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I'm using PowerTop v2.1 in Ubuntu 13.04 and I'm getting some pretty strange readings. I've already run powertop --calibrate too. The main screen reads this:

enter image description here

As you can see, the power estimates do add up to about 12.8W, perhaps a bit more. However, the device 'USB device: USB2.0-CRW (Generic)' is reporting a shocking 8.7W of usage. I believe this is the SD card reader on my laptop, I'd like to try to disable it but am not sure how.

But I'm also fairly certain this number can't be right - even at 100% usage I don't think it's going to use 8.7W, and there's no way that power hogs like wlan0 and chromium-browser and perhaps compiz are using less than 1W.

Can anyone offer their thoughts about what might be wrong and what steps I can take to reduce power usage and/or get PowerTop to report correctly?

powertop

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can instead generate an html report that will give you the basis to optimize your settings. Run:

     sudo powertop --html

    It will generate an html inform, which will have an "Tunning" section with all the optimization you could do to your system:

    enter image description here

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  2. I'm running same version of powertop as you I guess:

    kreso@h17:~$ sudo powertop --version
PowerTOP versionv2.1, compiled on Aug 23 2012

    and I do not have that option like you have --configure.. but I have this:

    sudo powertop --calibrate

    When you run it it will do a couple of test and optimizations for laptop to optimize the power usage on ports, display, cpu etc..

    This one is my favorite:

    enter image description here

    and then try to run it again.. see if that helps,

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