Tips to extend battery life for laptops and notebooks

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Is it possible to greatly extend the usage time of a laptop or notebook 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?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

Install the package laptop-mode-tools.

This package is not necessary on newer versions of Ubuntu:

• Is "laptop-mode-tools" still relevant for 12.04 and the 3.x kernels?

Solution 3:

I've been able to more than double the battery life of my netbook by turning off a bunch of services I don't need, and unloading their kernel drivers.

Use service --status-all to see what's running on your system, and service <service-name> stop to shut it down.

Use lsmod to see what kernel modules are loaded, and rmmod <module> to unload it.

If/when you want to bring things back, easiest way is to simply reboot.

Sometimes you also need to kill daemons or programs that are using the service or driver before they can be turned off. Look at output from ps aux to see what's running, and kill -9 <pid> to terminate them.

Services I usually turn off include: Ubuntu One, ssh, apache, databases, avahi, pulseaudio, cups, apparmor, acpi-daemon, bluetooth. Modules I unload: The whole audio stack, usb_storage, webcam drivers, wireless, bluetooth. (Some services like audio don't die easily.)

I've even gone as far as shutting down x (service gdm stop) and working entirely just from consoles, which let me stretch my netbook battery life to nearly 8 hours.

Solution 4:

Here are a few ideas:

• Turn off WiFi and Bluetooth
• Reduce screen brightness
• Reduce desktop effects (System->Preferences->Appearance->Visual Effects->None)
• Use Hibernate rather than suspend power features (System->Preferences->Power Management->On Battery Power)

Solution 5:

Improve Power Usage / Battery Life In Linux With TLP

I will Update my answer on Is there a power saving application similar to Jupiter?, please have a look