[Tfug] battery life, power management and windows vs linux

[Jeremy D Rogers]

> >Changing the refresh rate range or using 16 bit depth in the xorg.conf
> >file results in badness for me. In this case Badness  = no video out
> >on either X or console after restarting X, along with some strange
> >panics on reboot. I think that will end my attempts to play with
> >refresh rate or bitdepth for now.
> >
>
> To the best of my knowledge, I have never seen a LCD which is multisync.  Not
> that they don't exist, mind you, I've just never been witness to one.

That's exactly what I thought, but now I'm wondering since the
super-extra-special ATI config tool in windows claims it can knock it
down for saving power on battery. This could also be a case of poor
terminology in that I would not be surprised if the
super-extra-special ATI config tool was just changing the GPU freq and
calling it the refresh rate. Who knows with closed source. Bah.

> As for the 16bpp issue, I can actually help you there... or at least explain
> what happened.  I have a desktop ATI Radeon card in my PC and just recently I
> was attempting to get System Shock 2 to run under Wine.  It runs, but *very*
> slowly.  Turns out it runs in 16bpp.  X was running in 32bit and had to
> convert everything.
>
> So, I told X to start in 16bpp instead and... nothing.  Upon rebooting (this
> killed the screen, but not the machine) I looked at the X log and learned that
> the proprietary ATI fglrx driver does not support 16bpp at all.  :(

Well, I won't say that makes sense, but it's good to know. I'm a bit
shocked that it doesn't support 16bpp when it obviously does in
windows. At least now I can give up on that line of experimenting.

Thanks,
JDR