acertimeline team mailing list archive

[Alexander Simon <simon_alex@xxxxxx>]

Hi List,

i got my 3810TG a last week. TG is the new series with Buetooth, UMTS and ATI 
switchable graphics on a Radeon 4330.
After installing openSuSE 11.2-Milestone6 an some initial configuration, 
powertop gave me over 20 watts of power consumption.
As the BIOS was set to "switchable graphics", i guessed that BOTH graphic 
chipsets were active. lspci listed both, Xorg however, only could find the 
onboard Intel chipset.
After switching to "discrete" in BIOS, i could install fglrx (after patching 
for kernel 2.6.31) and power consumption went down to 12 watts, probably due 
to ATIs PowerPlay.

The BIOS has _no_ option to disable the ATI chipset. Lenovos BIOS offers a 
third option "integrated" to deactivate ATI completely. So these long battery 
lifetime can ONLY be reached in Vista. I wont be satisfied with this.

Has anyone of you confronted Acer with this problem? Or do you know if a 
better BIOS is to be realeased? I also found no piece of software to 
deactivate ATI via software in Linux.

Thanks, Alex