Laptop battery life drastically decreased compared to Windows 7 [duplicate]

use powertop and see where the power goes

powertop is awesome tool, and if you have intel hardware check this out http://www.lesswatts.org http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/known.php

The Ubuntu Power Management Wiki says a system should be waking up about 40 times per second. Yours is 476!

That said, here is my output:

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 185.4    interval: 1.8s
Power usage (ACPI estimate): 5.8W (8.9 hours) (long term: 6.4W,/8.1h)

Top causes for wakeups:
  37.5% (137.0)   [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
  19.2% ( 70.0)   chromium-browse
  10.4% ( 38.0)   [uhci_hcd:usb5, eth1] <interrupt>
   8.2% ( 30.0)   [kernel core] hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
   7.7% ( 28.0)   [kernel core] add_timer (wl_timer)
   4.9% ( 18.0)   xbindkeys
   4.4% ( 16.0)   [i915@pci:0000:00:02.0] <interrupt>
   2.5% (  9.0)   Xorg
   1.9% (  7.0)   PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad interrupt
   1.1% (  4.0)   [Rescheduling interrupts] <kernel IPI>
   0.5% (  2.0)   gvfs-afc-volume
   0.5% (  2.0)   gnome-terminal

What I find interesting:

• my wakeups are 185, which is much lower than your 476, but higher than the 40 target
• your reported power usage is only 2.5W - that sounds suspiciously low
• I'm getting 8.9 hours of battery life, which is about what it should be

First obvious thing to try. Run this from a bash prompt:

cat /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode

It should print 5.

After that, maybe others have some ideas, or read the Wiki to see if that helps.

It sounds like your laptop's ACPI support is poor. this happens when the laptop manufacturer doesn't document all the quirks in the power saving features. The outcome is that Ubuntu can not make parts of the laptop go to sleep, and worse the cores can't be switched off when not required.

What I think you should do is switch off bluetooth, see how that effects the battery and the load. Then turn off wifi and see if that effects it. Check your bios settings for compatibility ACPI support and see if you have anything running which is constantly checking the disk.

Also check to see what brightness your screen is set to, lots of energy burns away with the screen.