Wireless slows down when on battery

[Ctulhu]

I have Mint 10 running on a Dell Latitude E6500 notebook and am using the Broadcom STA wireless driver (just in passing, same happens on Ubuntu 10.10). My problem is this:

- when the computer is plugged into a power outlet, wireless works fine, but
- when the computer is running on battery, it hardly works at all: The network strength indicator item still shows the same connection strength but data are not transmitted anymore or only extremely slowly (like, 4000 B/sec; google.com might 2 minutes to load).

The drop in performance literally happens 1 sec after unplugging it, and once the notebook is plugged into external power again, it resumes after a few seconds. (I have tested this with big downloads where you can see Firefox's or the Update Manager's download speeds.) The BIOS doesn't seem to have power saving settings that make that happen, and I haven't found any in Mint -- any clues??

[AdamS]

called power saver feature

Code: Select all

sudo iwconfig eth1 power off

swap eth1 for your connection name

etho or what ever

[Ctulhu]

Man, it's as easy as that?!! Thanks so much, but I hadn't found any GUI type of power setting tweaker. Follow-up question: is there a way to make that permanent?
Again, thx!!

[AdamS]

yes and no

best to make a simple custom launcher and pin it to the dock or panel

Simple as click and enter password

remember to check the box to use terminal with it due to sudo being needed.

Screenshot-20.png

[Ctulhu]

Ok, mine is not as nice as yours, but I put it in Menu: Internet.

Thx so much,
C