Ubuntu – Tips to extend battery life for laptops and notebooks

batterypower-managementservices

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It is possible to greatly extend the usage time of a laptop or netbook running on battery by disabling various services and installing various packages.

What tricks or tips do people have for getting an extra hour or two out of their batteries?

Best Answer

Use powertop to see which programs are doing unneeded background processing such as beagle/tracker, weather notifications, gnome-do, and (if you don't need the internet) network-manager, mail-notifications.

Run sudo powertop --auto-tune to set all tunable options to their GOOD settings.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Reduced battery life in the netbook

Try the jupiter power management applet. I'm getting ~4 hours.

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/09/jupiter-applet-finally-available-for.html

It says you need to use a hack or something in the instructions, but I just added the ppa, updated, installed, and restarted unity or logged out and in again (I cant remember which), and I'm pretty sure it just worked.

If not, you may have to whitelist it, but it should do that on its own I believe.

Ubuntu – Does TLP really help increase battery life

TLP is a framework that controls lots of power management options for laptops and works for all laptops (except that Thinkpads require specific configuration). Without TLP, you may still be using some of your laptop's power management options: TLP is just a package that offers fairly comprehensive control over a wide range of laptop power management features all in one place and its default configuration is good for battery life.

Your tlp-stat output indicates that TLP is active, with this section

+++ System Status
TLP power save = enabled
power source   = battery

And you can also see all the devices whose power consumption it is controlling.

As for why the battery current did not update between two runs, I don't know the answer. It is possible that the battery hardware in your laptop doesn't report this statistic correctly or averages it over a specific time period. This in itself is not an indication that TLP is not working; a proper test should involve giving the laptop a known workload and timing how long it is until the battery depletes. Of course this takes time.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Reduced battery life in the netbook

Ubuntu – Does TLP really help increase battery life

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