Yeah, the USB 2.0 asyncrhonous scheduler bug that was initially reported in Core Duo laptops apparrently also causes problems on Sonoma based non-core duo laptops as well.

This bug causes you to lose as much as 28% of your battery life just for having an unused USB device plugged in. This affects some t-43's as well as upcoming core-duo laptops from many major pc makers.

http://anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=2693

Basically, if you've got a usb device plugged in and aren't using it and have a sonoma or napa based intel notebook, you're going to be recharging the batteries alot more than you should have to.

[Edited on February 13, 2006 at 2:20 PM. Reason : and yeah, I realize i should have said "devices". blargh I'm fucking tired.]

2/13/2006 2:20:10 PM

Intel has a history of things like this; like the chipset they released that had USB 2.0 ports that would be seen as 1.1 ports because the chips had the wrong identifiers.

2/13/2006 2:29:03 PM

George Bush Intel doesn't care about Black People USB 2.0

2/13/2006 2:36:36 PM

this seems like common sense from the beginning

2/13/2006 5:00:51 PM

no it doesn't.

2/13/2006 5:03:57 PM

oh.

then i'm smarter than the rest of you.

2/13/2006 5:08:17 PM

Uhh...then your "common sense" is wrong.

Read the article.

2/13/2006 5:11:46 PM

common sense maybe in the way that devices that draw power from the USB port will end up making the drain on your battery larger.

but that isn't the reason discussed in the article.

2/13/2006 5:15:47 PM

Quote :

"causes you to lose as much as 28% of your battery life just for having an unused USB device plugged in"

this is common sense...no, i didn't read the article, but it seems to me that leaving a USB device plugged in, and considering it's obvious that USB devices draw power from the computer (in a lot of cases), would be an obvious draw on the battery

2/13/2006 5:19:44 PM

yea but not a 28% difference.

The problem is that when any USB device is plugged in (including an externally powered usb HDD) the cpu is never allowed to go into one of its low power modes.

So the cpu stays in full power mode and chews up battery.

2/13/2006 5:24:29 PM

Quote :

"yea but not a 28% difference."

2/13/2006 5:49:07 PM

^^yep

^^^ . Sure having a flash drive plugged in should draw some power, but as you can see in the article, if you do actually read it, it the usb device itself is not actually draining the power. The power drawn from an unused usb 2.0 flash drive should have a negligible effect on battery life, not a 25+% drop! But as another post pointed out, it is infact a defect in the way the cpu and board behave, not how much power the usb device actually gets.

While it's common sense that USB devices draw power... it is not by any means common sense that low power usb devices will drain your battery life like crazy on a few specific laptop boards... nor is it common sense that plugging a USB device in would cause the CPU not to drop to low power settings.

[Edited on February 13, 2006 at 11:24 PM. Reason : ]

2/13/2006 11:22:05 PM