USB mouse cuts out on battery power

I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit laptop, and I have a Microsoft mouse. When I'm on the battery power the mouse cuts in and out, I have full battery power so it's not because of low power. It never does this in Windows, and in the past when I ran Karmic it never did this either, only when I reinstalled Ubuntu with Natty. As soon as I plug in the power it works perfectly fine.

Solution 1:

This behaviour is caused by laptop-mode-tools. While it's true that removing it completely solves the "problem", you may still want to keep the package on your system.

In order to disable the usb autosuspend feature of laptop-mode-tools for your mouse, you can insert your mouse's USBID (obtainable through lsusb) in

/etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/usb-autosuspend.conf

on the line

AUTOSUSPEND_USBID_BLACKLIST="your-usb-id"

where your-usb-id is of the format 093a:2510 (this is my mouse). If AUTOSUSPEND_USBID_BLACKLIST is already there, simply add the necessary USBID (note this will work only if AUTOSUSPEND_USE_WHITELIST is set to 0).

Finally, reload laptop-mode-tools by executing

# service laptop-mode reload

or

$ sudo service laptop-mode reload

Solution 2:

Make sure you don't have the laptop-mode-tools or powertop packages installed. If you do, uninstall them by running

sudo apt-get remove --purge laptop-mode-tools powertop && apt-get autoremove

This solved the issue for me on Mint 13 on an Alienware M14x R2.

Solution 3:

I should note that after 11.10 that problem no longer existed for me. So the answer to this problem is just update! :D