[update: A lot of people have reported that the wifi becomes effiectively unuseable after doing this change. We have also found out the 'JKK' has a rather unique Amtek 700 in his hands. Even Amtek are suprised at his good battery life statistics and we have now put Amtek in touch with JKK so that they can work together to see why JKK's Amtek 700 has such good battery life.]

Top marks to Origamiproject forum member ‘JKK’ who posted that he was getting 2 hours web surfing without doing anything except enabling power-save mode on the Wifi hardware. He didn’t need to disable the USB bus as we’d been doing in previous tests.

I went straight onto the Origamiportal IRC channel as soon as I saw the post where I spoke to John Tokash. He has just finished a set of tests and sure enough, it worked! Its reduced his battery drain at idle down to 13watts (from 17Watts) giving him about 20 mins extra battery life at low-use.

Tablet Kiosk aren’t off the hook yet though as there’s still a few issues with this ‘fix’

As far as we can see through our testing though, enabling this setting reduces the Wifi power so you might lose range. John also had an initial problem seeing his wifi networks after a reboot (and again after rebooting with the power-save turned OFF again) but after removing and re-enabling the hardware, it seemed to work OK. We tested standby and that worked too. The other issue is that we still don’t see the important CPU C3 sleep state being used.

John is now going putting is Eo through a long-term battery test with the Notebook Hardware Control program. NHC is showing 13.2W drain with a lifetime of 1:44. JKK has also told us that he’s not seeing C3 states but he’s getting 2hrs.

Here’s the details on how to apply the fix:

Right click on your Wireless Network Connection, choose Properties. In the Properties dialog, choose Configure. Choose the Advanced tab of the Configure dialog. Set Power Save Mode to enabled. Hit OK.

Thanks once again to JKK for posting and John Tokash for testing and as always, there will be updates if we make significant steps forward.

Regards
Steve.